Embracing Life's Unexpected Challenges: The Reason You Can't Simply Click 'Undo'

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

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

When we were meant to be on holiday but could not be, I kept feeling a tug towards looking for silver linings: “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 down. And then I would confront the reality that this holiday had truly vanished: my husband’s surgery required frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a short period for an pleasant vacation on the Belgian coast. So, no getaway. Just disappointment and frustration, suffering and attention.

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 wanted was to be truthful to myself. In those times when I was able to halt battling the disappointment and we addressed it instead, it felt like we were sharing an experience. Instead of feeling depressed and trying to appear happy, I’ve granted myself all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and hatred and rage, which at least seemed authentic. At times, it even became possible to appreciate our moments at home together.

This reminded me of a wish I sometimes notice in my counseling individuals, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could perhaps reverse our unwanted experiences, like hitting a reverse switch. But that arrow only goes in reverse. Confronting the reality that this is not possible and embracing the grief and rage for things not happening how we expected, rather than a false optimism, can enable a shift: from avoidance and sadness, to development and opportunity. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be profoundly impactful.

We view depression as experiencing negativity – but to my mind it’s a kind of deadening of all emotions, a suppressing of anger and sadness and frustration and delight and energy, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but acknowledging every sentiment, a kind of honest emotional expression and release.

I have often found myself trapped in this desire to erase events, but my toddler is helping me to grow out of it. As a recent parent, I was at times swamped 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 diaper swaps, and then the doing it once more before you’ve even finished the swap you were doing. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – efficiency blended with affection – are a reassurance and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, unceasing and exhausting. What astounded me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the psychological needs.

I had thought my most primary duty as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. 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 hunger could seem insatiable; my nourishment could not be produced rapidly, or it came too fast. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she despised being changed, and cried as if she were falling into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed soothed by the embraces we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were distant from us, that nothing we had to offer could aid.

I soon learned that my most important job as a mother was first to persevere, and then to support her in managing the intense emotions caused by the impossibility of my protecting her from all unease. As she grew her ability to ingest and absorb milk, she also had to develop a capacity to digest her emotions and her pain when the milk didn’t come, or when she was hurting, or any other hard and bewildering experience – and I had to develop alongside her (and my) frustration, rage, despair, hatred, disappointment, hunger. My job was not to ensure everything was perfect, but to support in creating understanding to her sentimental path of things not going so well.

This was the difference, for her, between being with 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 distinction, for me, between aiming to have great about performing flawlessly as a flawless caregiver, and instead building the ability to accept my own imperfections in order to do a adequately performed – and comprehend my daughter’s letdown and frustration with me. The difference between my trying to stop her crying, and comprehending when she needed to cry.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel not as strongly the urge to press reverse and change our narrative into one where everything goes well. I find faith in my sense of a capacity developing within to acknowledge that this is impossible, and to understand that, when I’m focused on striving to rearrange a trip, what I really need is to weep.