Facing Our Unexpected Challenges: Why You Cannot Simply Press 'Undo'

I wish you enjoyed a pleasant summer: I did not. On the day we were supposed to be go on holiday, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, expecting him to have urgent but routine surgery, which meant our vacation arrangements were forced to be cancelled.

From this experience I learned something significant, all over again, about how hard it is for me to feel bad when things don't work out. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more everyday, subtly crushing disappointments that – unless we can actually feel them – will significantly depress us.

When we were supposed to be on holiday but were not, I kept feeling a tug towards seeking optimism: “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 remained low, just a bit blue. And then I would confront 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 relaxing trip on the Belgian coast. So, no holiday. Just letdown and irritation, suffering and attention.

I know graver situations can happen, it's merely a vacation, such a fortunate concern to have – I know because I used that reasoning too. But what I required was to be honest with myself. In those instances 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 smile, I’ve given myself permission all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to anger and frustration and loathing and fury, which at least seemed authentic. At times, it even became possible to value our days at home together.

This brought to mind of a wish I sometimes observe in my therapy clients, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could perhaps erase our difficult moments, like hitting a reverse switch. But that button only goes in reverse. Facing the reality that this is not possible and accepting the grief and rage for things not working out how we expected, rather than a false optimism, can promote a transformation: from denial and depression, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be life-changing.

We consider depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of deadening of all emotions, a repressing of frustration and sorrow and disappointment and joy and life force, and all the rest. The substitute for depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and release.

I have repeatedly found myself trapped in this wish to click “undo”, but my little one is supporting my evolution. As a first-time mom, I was at times swamped by the amazing requirements of my baby. Not only the nourishing – sometimes for a lengthy period at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the diaper swaps, and then the repeating the process before you’ve even completed the swap you were changing. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a solace and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, persistent and tiring. What surprised me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the feelings requirements.

I had believed my most important job as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. But I soon came to realise that it was not possible to meet all of my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her hunger could seem unmeetable; my supply could not arrive quickly, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to alter her clothes – but she hated being changed, and sobbed as if she were plunging into a shadowy pit of misery. And while sometimes she seemed comforted by the hugs we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were separated from us, that no solution we provided could assist.

I soon realized that my most important job as a mother was first to persevere, and then to support her in managing the powerful sentiments triggered by the infeasibility of my guarding her from all distress. As she developed her capacity to consume and process milk, she also had to build an ability to digest her emotions and her suffering when the milk didn’t come, or when she was in pain, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to evolve with her (and my) annoyance, fury, despondency, hatred, disappointment, hunger. My job was not to guarantee smooth experiences, but to support in creating understanding to her feelings journey of things being less than perfect.

This was the contrast, for her, between being with someone who was attempting to provide her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being assisted in developing a ability to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the distinction, for me, between desiring to experience excellent about doing a perfect job as a ideal parent, and instead developing the capacity to endure my own shortcomings in order to do a good enough job – and grasp my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The contrast between my trying to stop her crying, and recognizing when she needed to cry.

Now that we have developed beyond this together, I feel not as strongly the urge to click erase and rewrite our story into one where everything goes well. I find hope in my awareness of a capacity growing inside me to acknowledge that this is impossible, and to comprehend that, when I’m focused on striving to rebook a holiday, what I truly require is to sob.