Accepting Our Unplanned Challenges: The Reason You Cannot Simply Click 'Undo'

I hope you had a good summer: my experience was different. The very day we were supposed to be go on holiday, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, expecting him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which meant our getaway ideas were forced to be cancelled.

From this episode I realized a truth significant, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to experience sadness when things go wrong. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more routine, gently heartbreaking disappointments that – without the ability to actually experience them – will truly burden us.

When we were supposed to be on holiday but weren't, I kept experiencing a pull 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 never felt better, just a bit depressed. And then I would bump up against the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery necessitated frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a short period for an enjoyable break on the shores of Belgium. So, no holiday. Just disappointment and frustration, pain and care.

I know graver situations can happen, it's merely a vacation, what a privileged problem to have – I know because I tested that argument too. But what I required was to be honest with myself. In those times when I was able to halt battling the disappointment and we discussed it instead, it felt like we were going through something together. Instead of experiencing sadness and trying to appear happy, I’ve given myself permission all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to anger and frustration and aversion and wrath, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even was feasible to value our days at home together.

This recalled of a hope I sometimes see in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could perhaps undo our negative events, like pressing a reset button. But that button only points backwards. Confronting the reality that this is impossible and accepting the sorrow and anger for things not happening how we anticipated, rather than a insincere positive spin, can promote a transformation: from denial and depression, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be profoundly impactful.

We think of depression as experiencing negativity – but to my mind it’s a kind of dulling of all emotions, a repressing of anger and sadness and letdown and happiness and energy, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and liberty.

I have frequently found myself trapped in this desire to reverse things, but my young child is assisting me in moving past it. As a first-time mom, I was at times overwhelmed by the astonishing demands 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 changing, and then the changing again before you’ve even ended the change you were doing. These routine valuable duties among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a reassurance and a tremendous privilege. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What shocked me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the emotional demands.

I had thought my most primary duty 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 demanded it. Her appetite could seem unmeetable; my nourishment could not come fast enough, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to change her – but she hated being changed, and wept as if she were descending into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed soothed by the hugs we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were lost to us, that no comfort we gave could assist.

I soon learned that my most crucial role as a mother was first to persevere, and then to support her in managing the powerful sentiments triggered by the unattainability of my guarding her from all unease. As she developed her capacity to take in and digest milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to digest her emotions and her pain when the nourishment was delayed, or when she was hurting, or any other hard and bewildering experience – and I had to develop alongside her (and my) irritation, anger, hopelessness, loathing, discontent, need. My job was not to guarantee smooth experiences, but to assist in finding significance to her sentimental path of things not working out ideally.

This was the difference, for her, between being with someone who was trying to give her only good feelings, and instead being helped to grow a capacity to experience all feelings. It was the difference, for me, between aiming to have wonderful about executing ideally as a ideal parent, and instead cultivating the skill to accept my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a sufficiently well – and comprehend my daughter’s letdown and frustration with me. The contrast between my trying to stop her crying, and comprehending when she had to sob.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel reduced the desire to hit “undo” and alter our history into one where things are ideal. I find hope in my feeling of a ability growing inside me to acknowledge that this is unattainable, and to understand that, when I’m focused on striving to rebook a holiday, what I really need is to cry.