🔗 Share this article

I wish you enjoyed a pleasant summer: mine was not. On the day we were planning to go on holiday, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have prompt but common surgery, which resulted in our travel plans had to be cancelled.

From this situation I learned something valuable, all over again, about how hard it is for me to experience sadness when things don't work out. I’m not talking about major catastrophes, but the more common, gently heartbreaking disappointments that – unless we can actually acknowledge them – will really weigh us down.

When we were expected to be on holiday but were not, I kept feeling a tug towards finding the positive: “I can {book a replacement trip|schedule another vacation|arrange a different getaway”; “At least we have {travel insurance|coverage for trips|protection for journeys”; “This’ll give me {something to write about|material for an article|content for a story”. But I didn't improve, just a bit depressed. And then I would bump up against the reality that this holiday had truly vanished: my husband’s surgery involved frequent uncomfortable wound care, and there is a limited time window for an pleasant vacation on the shores of Belgium. So, no getaway. Just letdown and irritation, hurt and nurturing.

I know graver situations can happen, it’s only a holiday, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I tested that argument too. But what I required was to be sincere with my feelings. In those moments when I was able to stop fighting off the disappointment and we addressed it instead, it felt like we were sharing an experience. Instead of feeling depressed and trying to put on a brave face, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of unpleasant emotions, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and hatred and rage, which at least felt real. At times, it even became possible to appreciate our moments at home together.

This recalled of a desire I sometimes notice in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also seen in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could perhaps erase our difficult moments, like hitting a reverse switch. But that button only looks to the past. Confronting the reality that this is impossible and embracing the grief and rage for things not working out how we anticipated, rather than a insincere positive spin, can facilitate a change of current: from rejection and low mood, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be transformative.

We consider depression as experiencing negativity – but to my mind it’s a kind of deadening of all emotions, a repressing of frustration and sorrow and letdown and happiness and life force, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and liberty.

I have often found myself stuck in this wish to erase events, but my young child is helping me to grow out of it. As a new mother, I was at times burdened by the amazing requirements of my infant. Not only the nursing – sometimes for more than 60 minutes at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the outfit alterations, and then the doing it once more before you’ve even finished the task you were doing. These everyday important activities among so many others – efficiency blended with affection – are a reassurance and a tremendous privilege. Though they’re also, at moments, unceasing and exhausting. What shocked me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the emotional demands.

I had thought my most key role as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon understood that it was not possible to meet all of my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her craving could seem insatiable; my supply could not be produced rapidly, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to change her – but she disliked being changed, and wept as if she were descending into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed consoled by the cuddles we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were lost to us, that no solution we provided could help.

I soon realized that my most important job as a mother was first to endure, and then to help her digest the powerful sentiments provoked by the unattainability of my guarding her from all unease. As she enhanced her skill to consume and process milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to process her feelings and her suffering when the supply was insufficient, or when she was hurting, or any other challenging and perplexing experience – and I had to develop alongside her (and my) frustration, rage, despair, loathing, discontent, need. My job was not to ensure everything was perfect, but to help bring meaning to her emotional experience of things not going so well.

This was the distinction, for her, between having someone who was seeking to offer her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being assisted in developing a skill to feel every emotion. It was the contrast, for me, between aiming to have wonderful about performing flawlessly as a perfect mother, and instead building the ability to endure my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a sufficiently well – and grasp my daughter’s letdown and frustration with me. The distinction between my attempting to halt her crying, and understanding when she had to sob.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel less keenly the desire to hit “undo” and rewrite our story into one where everything goes well. I find faith in my sense of a capacity developing within to understand that this is impossible, and to understand that, when I’m occupied with attempting to rebook a holiday, what I really need is to cry.