Accepting Our Unplanned Setbacks: The Reason You Cannot Simply Click 'Undo'

I hope you had a good summer: I did not. The very day we were planning to travel for leisure, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, expecting him to have prompt but common surgery, which meant our getaway ideas were forced to be cancelled.

From this episode I learned something significant, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to feel bad when things go wrong. I’m not talking about major catastrophes, but the more everyday, gently heartbreaking disappointments that – unless we can actually feel them – will truly burden us.

When we were meant to be on holiday but weren't, I kept experiencing a pull towards seeking optimism: “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 face the reality that this holiday had truly vanished: my husband’s surgery necessitated frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a finite opportunity for an enjoyable break on the shores of Belgium. So, no holiday. Just letdown and irritation, hurt and nurturing.

I know worse things can happen, it’s only a holiday, what a privileged problem to have – I know because I tried that line too. But what I needed was to be truthful to myself. In those instances when I was able to stop fighting off the disappointment and we talked about it instead, it felt like we were going through something together. Instead of feeling depressed and trying to appear happy, I’ve granted myself all sorts of unpleasant emotions, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and loathing and fury, which at least seemed authentic. At times, it even became possible to value our days at home together.

This brought to mind of a wish I sometimes see in my therapy clients, and that I have also seen in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could somehow erase our difficult moments, like pressing a reset button. But that button only points backwards. Confronting the reality that this is not possible and accepting the sorrow and anger for things not happening how we expected, rather than a insincere positive spin, can promote a transformation: from avoidance and sadness, to development and opportunity. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be profoundly impactful.

We view depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of deadening of all emotions, a suppressing of rage and grief and disappointment and joy and energy, 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 wish to reverse things, but my young child is supporting my evolution. As a recent parent, I was at times burdened by the incredible needs of my newborn. Not only the nourishing – sometimes for over an hour 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 completed the swap you were handling. These routine valuable duties among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a comfort and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, persistent and tiring. What astounded me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the emotional demands.

I had believed my most key role as a mother was to fulfill my infant's requirements. But I soon realized that it was not possible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her craving could seem endless; my nourishment could not arrive quickly, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she hated being changed, and wept as if she were descending into a gloomy abyss of despair. And while sometimes she seemed comforted by the hugs we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were separated from us, that nothing we had to offer could assist.

I soon discovered that my most important job as a mother was first to endure, and then to support her in managing the overwhelming feelings triggered by the unattainability of my guarding her from all unease. As she enhanced her skill to ingest and absorb milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to process her feelings and her pain when the milk didn’t come, or when she was suffering, or any other challenging and perplexing experience – and I had to evolve with her (and my) annoyance, fury, despondency, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to make things go well, but to support in creating understanding to her feelings journey of things being less than perfect.

This was the contrast, for her, between having someone who was attempting to provide her only positive emotions, and instead being supported in building a skill to feel every emotion. It was the difference, for me, between aiming to have excellent about doing a perfect job as a perfect mother, and instead developing the capacity to accept my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a sufficiently well – and comprehend my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The contrast between my seeking to prevent her crying, and understanding when she had to sob.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel less keenly the wish to hit “undo” and rewrite our story into one where all is perfect. I find optimism in my awareness of a capacity developing within to understand that this is unattainable, and to realize that, when I’m busy trying to rearrange a trip, what I truly require is to sob.