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

I hope you had a good summer: mine was not. On the 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 caused our vacation arrangements had to be cancelled.

From this situation I gained insight significant, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to feel bad when things take a turn. I’m not talking about major catastrophes, but the more everyday, subtly crushing disappointments that – if we don't actually acknowledge them – will truly burden us.

When we were expected to be on holiday but were not, 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 blue. And then I would confront the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery involved frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a finite opportunity for an relaxing trip on the shores of Belgium. So, no vacation. Just discontent and annoyance, pain and care.

I know more serious issues can happen, it’s only a holiday, what a privileged problem to have – I know because I tested that argument 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 experiencing sadness and trying to smile, I’ve granted myself all sorts of unpleasant emotions, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and loathing and fury, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even was feasible to appreciate our moments at home together.

This brought to mind of a desire I sometimes see in my therapy clients, and that I have also seen in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could in some way undo our negative events, like clicking “undo”. But that button only looks to the past. Confronting the reality that this is unattainable and allowing the sorrow and anger for things not happening how we anticipated, rather than a insincere positive spin, can promote a transformation: from avoidance and sadness, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be life-changing.

We think of depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a suppressing of rage and grief and disappointment and joy and vitality, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and freedom.

I have often found myself caught in this wish to reverse things, but my little one is supporting my evolution. As a new mother, I was at times swamped by the amazing requirements of my newborn. Not only the nursing – 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 change you were changing. These everyday important activities among so many others – efficiency blended with affection – are a reassurance and a tremendous privilege. Though they’re also, at moments, unceasing and exhausting. What astounded me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the feelings requirements.

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 needed it. Her appetite could seem endless; my nourishment could not be produced rapidly, or it came too fast. And then we needed to change her – but she despised being changed, and wept as if she were plunging 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 no solution we provided could help.

I soon realized that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to persevere, and then to support her in managing the intense emotions triggered by the infeasibility of my shielding her from all unease. As she grew her ability to take in and digest milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to manage her sentiments and her pain when the supply was insufficient, or when she was suffering, or any other hard and bewildering experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) annoyance, fury, despondency, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to make things go well, but to assist in finding significance to her emotional experience of things not going so well.

This was the distinction, for her, between experiencing someone who was seeking to offer her only positive emotions, and instead being helped to grow a skill to feel every emotion. It was the difference, for me, between wanting to feel great about doing a perfect job as a flawless caregiver, and instead building the ability to accept my own imperfections in order to do a sufficiently well – and comprehend my daughter’s letdown and frustration 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 reduced the wish to click erase and change our narrative into one where things are ideal. I find faith in my awareness of a skill growing inside me to recognise that this is not possible, and to comprehend that, when I’m busy trying to rebook a holiday, what I truly require is to weep.