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

I hope you had a good summer: my experience was different. On the day we were scheduled to travel for leisure, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which resulted in our travel plans had to be cancelled.

From this situation I gained insight significant, all over again, about how challenging 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 feel them – will truly burden us.

When we were meant to be on holiday but weren't, 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 down. And then I would bump up against the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery necessitated frequent uncomfortable wound care, and there is a finite opportunity for an relaxing trip on the Belgian coast. So, no getaway. Just disappointment and frustration, hurt and nurturing.

I know more serious issues can happen, it's merely a vacation, such a fortunate concern to have – I know because I tried that line too. But what I required was to be sincere with my feelings. In those times when I was able to stop fighting off the disappointment and we addressed it instead, it felt like we were going through something together. Instead of being down and trying to smile, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and aversion and wrath, 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 observe in my counseling individuals, and that I have also experienced in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could perhaps undo our negative events, like hitting a reverse switch. But that button only goes in reverse. Facing the reality that this is impossible and allowing the grief and rage for things not turning out how we expected, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can promote a transformation: from denial and depression, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it needs duration – this can be profoundly impactful.

We consider depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of dulling of all emotions, a suppressing of rage and grief and disappointment and joy and vitality, and all the rest. The substitute for depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of honest emotional expression and release.

I have often found myself caught in this urge to erase events, but my little one is assisting me in moving past it. As a first-time mom, I was at times swamped by the incredible needs of my newborn. Not only the feeding – sometimes for a lengthy period at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the diaper swaps, and then the doing it once more before you’ve even ended the swap you were handling. These everyday important activities 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 sleep deprivation – were the emotional demands.

I had believed my most key role as a mother was to fulfill my infant's requirements. But I soon understood that it was impossible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her appetite could seem endless; my nourishment could not come fast enough, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to change her – but she despised being changed, and cried as if she were falling into a shadowy pit of misery. And while sometimes she seemed consoled by the hugs we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were lost to us, that no solution we provided could aid.

I soon learned that my most important job as a mother was first to endure, and then to help her digest the overwhelming feelings triggered by the infeasibility of my protecting her from all unease. As she grew her ability to ingest and absorb milk, she also had to build an ability to manage her sentiments and her suffering when the milk didn’t come, or when she was in pain, or any other challenging and perplexing 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 feelings journey of things being less than perfect.

This was the contrast, for her, between experiencing someone who was attempting to provide her only good feelings, and instead being assisted in developing a capacity to feel every emotion. It was the difference, for me, between wanting to feel great 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 good enough job – and understand my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The difference between my attempting to halt her crying, and recognizing when she needed to cry.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel not as strongly the urge to click erase and change our narrative into one where all is perfect. I find optimism in my feeling of a skill evolving internally to acknowledge that this is impossible, and to comprehend that, when I’m occupied with attempting to rebook a holiday, what I really need is to sob.