Accepting Life's Unplanned Challenges: Why You Cannot Simply Press 'Undo'

I wish you enjoyed a pleasant summer: my experience was different. That day we were planning to go on holiday, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have prompt but common surgery, which meant our vacation arrangements were forced to be cancelled.

From this episode I learned something important, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to feel bad when things don't work out. I’m not talking about major catastrophes, but the more routine, gently heartbreaking disappointments that – if we don't actually experience them – will truly burden us.

When we were meant to be on holiday but weren't, I kept sensing an urge 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 didn't improve, just a bit down. And then I would confront the reality that this holiday had truly vanished: my husband’s surgery involved frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a short period for an pleasant vacation on the Belgium's beaches. So, no getaway. Just disappointment and frustration, hurt and nurturing.

I know more serious issues can happen, it's just a trip, an enviable dilemma 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 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 put on a brave face, I’ve granted myself all sorts of unpleasant emotions, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and aversion and wrath, which at least seemed authentic. At times, it even was feasible to enjoy our time at home together.

This recalled of a hope I sometimes observe in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could perhaps reverse our unwanted experiences, like pressing a reset button. But that arrow only looks to the past. Acknowledging the reality that this is impossible and accepting the pain and fury for things not turning out how we expected, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can promote a transformation: from avoidance and sadness, to development and opportunity. Over time – and, of course, it needs duration – this can be life-changing.

We consider depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a repressing 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 truthful emotional spontaneity and freedom.

I have frequently found myself trapped in this desire to click “undo”, but my young child is supporting my evolution. As a first-time mom, I was at times overwhelmed by the amazing requirements of my infant. Not only the nourishing – sometimes for over an hour at a time, and then again under 60 minutes after that – and not only the diaper swaps, and then the changing again before you’ve even finished the change you were handling. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – efficiency blended with affection – are a solace and a significant blessing. Though they’re also, at moments, unceasing and exhausting. What astounded me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the feelings requirements.

I had assumed my most important job as a mother was to fulfill my infant's requirements. But I soon understood that it was unfeasible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her appetite could seem endless; my nourishment could not arrive quickly, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she disliked being changed, and wept as if she were plunging into a shadowy pit of misery. And while sometimes she seemed consoled by the embraces we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were distant from us, that nothing we had to offer could help.

I soon learned that my most crucial role as a mother was first to survive, and then to help her digest the overwhelming feelings triggered by the unattainability of my guarding her from all unease. As she developed her capacity to consume and process milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to digest her emotions and her suffering when the milk didn’t come, 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, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to ensure everything was perfect, but to assist in finding significance to her sentimental path of things not going so well.

This was the contrast, for her, between being with someone who was attempting to provide her only good feelings, and instead being assisted in developing a ability to experience all feelings. It was the contrast, for me, between wanting to feel excellent about executing ideally as a perfect mother, and instead building the ability to tolerate my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a good enough job – and understand my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The contrast between my attempting to halt her crying, and recognizing when she needed to cry.

Now that we have developed beyond this together, I feel not as strongly the wish to click erase and alter our history into one where things are ideal. I find hope in my awareness of a ability developing within to understand that this is impossible, and to understand that, when I’m busy trying to rearrange a trip, what I truly require is to cry.