Accepting Life's Unplanned Challenges: Why You Can't Simply Click 'Undo'

I hope you had a enjoyable summer: I did not. The very day we were supposed to be go on holiday, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, expecting him to have prompt but common surgery, which resulted in our travel plans had to be cancelled.

From this situation I realized a truth valuable, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to acknowledge pain when things go wrong. I’m not talking about major catastrophes, but the more routine, quietly devastating disappointments that – without the ability to actually experience them – will really weigh us down.

When we were expected to be on holiday but were not, 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 depressed. And then I would face the reality that this holiday had truly vanished: my husband’s surgery involved frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a finite opportunity for an pleasant vacation on the shores of Belgium. So, no holiday. Just letdown and irritation, pain and care.

I know graver situations can happen, it's merely a vacation, such a fortunate concern to have – I know because I tested that argument too. But what I needed was to be sincere with my feelings. In those moments when I was able to cease resisting the disappointment and we talked about it instead, it felt like we were facing it as a team. Instead of being down and trying to put on a brave face, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of unpleasant emotions, including but not limited to anger and frustration 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 see in my therapy clients, and that I have also experienced in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could perhaps undo our negative events, like pressing a reset button. But that option only looks to the past. Acknowledging the reality that this is unattainable and embracing the pain and fury for things not turning out how we hoped, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can promote a transformation: from rejection and low mood, to development and opportunity. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be life-changing.

We consider depression as experiencing negativity – but to my mind it’s a kind of dulling of all emotions, a repressing of rage and grief and disappointment and joy and vitality, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and release.

I have repeatedly found myself stuck in this wish to click “undo”, but my young child is helping me to grow out of it. As a new mother, I was at times burdened by the amazing requirements of my baby. Not only the nourishing – sometimes for over an hour at a time, and then again under 60 minutes after that – and not only the changing, and then the repeating the process before you’ve even ended the swap you were handling. These everyday important activities among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a comfort and a significant blessing. Though they’re also, at moments, persistent and tiring. What shocked me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the feelings requirements.

I had assumed my most key role as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon understood that it was not possible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her appetite could seem insatiable; my milk could not come fast enough, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to alter her clothes – but she hated being changed, and wept as if she were plunging into a shadowy pit of misery. And while sometimes she seemed comforted by the cuddles we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were lost to us, that no solution we provided could assist.

I soon discovered that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to persevere, and then to assist her process the intense emotions provoked by the infeasibility of my guarding her from all unease. As she developed her capacity to consume and process milk, she also had to build an ability to process her feelings and her distress when the milk didn’t come, or when she was in pain, or any other hard and bewildering experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) irritation, anger, hopelessness, loathing, discontent, need. My job was not to guarantee smooth experiences, but to assist in finding significance to her sentimental path of things not working out ideally.

This was the contrast, for her, between experiencing someone who was trying to give her only positive emotions, and instead being supported in building a capacity to experience all feelings. It was the contrast, for me, between aiming to have excellent about doing a perfect job as a perfect mother, and instead developing the capacity to endure my own imperfections in order to do a sufficiently well – and grasp my daughter’s disappointment and anger 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 press reverse and alter our history into one where things are ideal. I find hope in my sense of a ability developing within to recognise that this is not possible, and to understand that, when I’m focused on striving to reschedule a vacation, what I truly require is to cry.