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

I hope you had a good summer: mine was not. On the day we were scheduled to take a vacation, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which meant our travel plans needed to be cancelled.

From this experience I realized a truth significant, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to acknowledge pain when things take a turn. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more routine, gently heartbreaking disappointments that – unless we can actually experience them – will really weigh us down.

When we were meant to be on holiday but could not be, 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 required frequent uncomfortable wound care, and there is a finite opportunity for an relaxing trip on the Belgian coast. So, no holiday. Just discontent and annoyance, suffering and attention.

I know worse things can happen, it's just a trip, what a privileged problem to have – I know because I used that reasoning too. But what I wanted was to be truthful to myself. In those moments 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 put on a brave face, I’ve given myself permission 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 enjoy our time at home together.

This brought to mind of a hope I sometimes see in my counseling individuals, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could in some way erase our difficult moments, like hitting a reverse switch. But that option only points backwards. Acknowledging the reality that this is not possible and embracing the grief and rage for things not happening how we hoped, rather than a insincere positive spin, can facilitate a change of current: from denial and depression, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be transformative.

We consider depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a suppressing of frustration and sorrow and letdown and happiness and life force, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of honest emotional expression and liberty.

I have repeatedly found myself trapped in this urge to click “undo”, but my young child is supporting my evolution. As a recent parent, I was at times swamped by the astonishing demands of my newborn. Not only the nursing – sometimes for over an hour at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the outfit alterations, and then the repeating the process before you’ve even finished the task you were changing. These day-to-day precious tasks 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 astounded me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the psychological needs.

I had assumed my most primary duty as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. But I soon came to realise that it was unfeasible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her appetite could seem unmeetable; my nourishment could not arrive quickly, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to alter her clothes – but she hated being changed, and wept as if she were falling into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed comforted by the embraces we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were distant from us, that no comfort we gave could help.

I soon discovered that my most important job as a mother was first to persevere, and then to help her digest the intense emotions provoked by the impossibility of my protecting her from all distress. As she developed her capacity to consume and process milk, she also had to build an ability to manage her sentiments and her distress when the nourishment was delayed, or when she was in pain, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to develop alongside her (and my) annoyance, fury, despondency, loathing, discontent, need. My job was not to make things go well, but to support in creating understanding to her emotional experience of things not working out ideally.

This was the contrast, for her, between having someone who was seeking to offer her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being supported in building a ability to experience all feelings. It was the distinction, for me, between wanting to feel excellent about performing flawlessly as a ideal parent, and instead building the ability to tolerate my own shortcomings in order to do a good enough job – and comprehend my daughter’s letdown and frustration with me. The distinction between my attempting to halt her crying, and recognizing when she required to weep.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel reduced the wish to click erase and rewrite our story into one where things are ideal. I find optimism in my sense of a ability growing inside me to recognise that this is not possible, and to understand that, when I’m focused on striving to rearrange a trip, what I really need is to weep.