Embracing Life's Unexpected Challenges: Why You Can't Simply Press 'Undo'

I trust your a enjoyable summer: my experience was different. On the day we were supposed to be go on holiday, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, expecting him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which meant our getaway ideas needed to be cancelled.

From this experience I gained insight important, all over again, about how hard it is for me to experience sadness when things go wrong. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more common, quietly devastating disappointments that – if we don't actually acknowledge them – will truly burden us.

When we were supposed to be on holiday but could not be, I kept experiencing a pull 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 never felt better, just a bit depressed. And then I would confront the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery required frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a short period for an enjoyable break on the Belgian coast. So, no holiday. Just discontent and annoyance, pain and care.

I know graver situations can happen, it's merely a vacation, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I tested that argument too. But what I wanted was to be honest with myself. In those instances when I was able to cease resisting the disappointment and we addressed it instead, it felt like we were going through something together. Instead of being down and trying to put on a brave face, I’ve given myself permission all sorts of unpleasant emotions, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and aversion and wrath, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even became possible to appreciate our moments at home together.

This recalled of a wish I sometimes observe in my counseling individuals, and that I have also experienced in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could in some way reverse our unwanted experiences, like hitting a reverse switch. But that arrow only looks to the past. Facing the reality that this is impossible and embracing the sorrow and anger for things not turning out how we hoped, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can facilitate a change of current: from denial and depression, to development and opportunity. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be profoundly impactful.

We think of depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of deadening of all emotions, a repressing of frustration and sorrow and frustration and delight and life force, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and liberty.

I have frequently found myself caught in this desire to erase events, but my toddler is assisting me in moving past it. As a recent parent, I was at times swamped by the amazing requirements of my baby. Not only the feeding – 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 completed the task you were handling. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – efficiency blended with affection – are a solace 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 feelings requirements.

I had believed my most primary duty as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon understood that it was not possible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her hunger could seem endless; my supply could not come fast enough, or it came too fast. And then we needed to change her – but she disliked being changed, and cried as if she were falling into a shadowy pit of misery. 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 solution we provided could assist.

I soon realized that my most important job as a mother was first to endure, and then to assist her process the powerful sentiments triggered by the unattainability of my guarding her from all discomfort. As she enhanced her skill to take in and digest milk, she also had to build an ability to manage her sentiments and her pain when the milk didn’t come, or when she was suffering, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to evolve with 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 being less than perfect.

This was the distinction, for her, between being with someone who was trying to give her only positive emotions, and instead being supported in building a capacity to feel every emotion. It was the difference, for me, between aiming to have wonderful about doing a perfect job as a perfect mother, and instead developing the capacity to tolerate my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a sufficiently well – and understand my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The contrast between my attempting to halt her crying, and recognizing when she had to sob.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel reduced the urge to hit “undo” and rewrite our story into one where everything goes well. I find optimism in my awareness of a capacity growing inside me to acknowledge that this is not possible, and to realize that, when I’m focused on striving to reschedule a vacation, what I really need is to sob.