Accepting Our Unexpected Challenges: Why You Can't Simply Click 'Undo'

I hope you had a enjoyable summer: my experience was different. The very day we were planning to take a vacation, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have urgent but routine surgery, which resulted in our vacation arrangements were forced to be cancelled.

From this situation I realized a truth valuable, all over again, about how hard it is for me to experience sadness when things take a turn. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more routine, subtly crushing disappointments that – without the ability to actually experience 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 didn't improve, just a bit blue. And then I would confront the reality that this holiday had truly vanished: my husband’s surgery involved frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a finite opportunity for an pleasant vacation on the shores of Belgium. So, no vacation. Just letdown and irritation, hurt and nurturing.

I know more serious issues can happen, it’s only a holiday, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I used that reasoning too. But what I required was to be sincere with my feelings. In those instances when I was able to cease resisting the disappointment and we talked about it instead, it felt like we were sharing an experience. Instead of being down and trying to put on a brave face, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and hatred and rage, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even became possible to enjoy our time at home together.

This reminded me of a wish I sometimes notice in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also experienced in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could perhaps reverse our unwanted experiences, like pressing a reset button. But that button only points backwards. Acknowledging the reality that this is not possible and accepting the grief and rage for things not happening how we hoped, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can enable a shift: from rejection and low mood, to development and opportunity. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be profoundly impactful.

We view depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of dulling of all emotions, a suppressing of anger and sadness 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 truthful emotional spontaneity and liberty.

I have often found myself stuck in this urge to click “undo”, but my toddler is assisting me in moving past it. As a recent parent, I was at times burdened by the incredible needs of my newborn. Not only the nourishing – sometimes for more than 60 minutes at a time, and then again less than an hour after that – and not only the outfit alterations, and then the changing again before you’ve even completed the task you were doing. These everyday important activities among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a reassurance 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 satisfy my child's demands. But I soon came to realise that it was impossible to meet all of my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her hunger could seem unmeetable; my supply could not come fast enough, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she despised being changed, and wept as if she were descending into a gloomy abyss of despair. And while sometimes she seemed comforted by the embraces we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were lost to us, that no comfort we gave could help.

I soon learned that my most crucial role as a mother was first to persevere, and then to help her digest the powerful sentiments provoked by the infeasibility of my shielding her from all discomfort. As she developed her capacity to ingest and absorb milk, she also had to develop a capacity to manage her sentiments and her suffering when the nourishment was delayed, or when she was hurting, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to develop alongside her (and my) annoyance, fury, despondency, hatred, disappointment, hunger. My job was not to ensure everything was perfect, but to support in creating understanding to her sentimental path of things being less than perfect.

This was the contrast, for her, between experiencing someone who was seeking to offer her only positive emotions, and instead being supported in building a skill to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the contrast, for me, between desiring to experience wonderful about executing ideally as a ideal parent, and instead cultivating the skill to tolerate my own imperfections in order to do a good enough job – and understand my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The contrast between my trying to stop her crying, and understanding when she required to weep.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel reduced the urge to click erase and rewrite our story into one where everything goes well. I find hope in my feeling of a capacity developing within to understand that this is impossible, and to understand that, when I’m busy trying to reschedule a vacation, what I truly require is to sob.