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I trust your a good summer: I did not. The very day we were scheduled to go on holiday, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, expecting him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which resulted in our vacation arrangements had to be cancelled.

From this situation I learned something important, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to acknowledge pain when things take a turn. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more common, quietly devastating disappointments that – if we don't actually feel them – will truly burden us.

When we were meant to be on holiday but could not be, 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 remained low, just a bit down. And then I would bump up against the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery necessitated frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a finite opportunity for an pleasant vacation on the Belgian coast. So, no holiday. Just disappointment and frustration, hurt and nurturing.

I know more serious issues can happen, it’s only a holiday, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I tried that line too. But what I required was to be honest with myself. In those moments when I was able to stop fighting off the disappointment and we addressed it instead, it felt like we were facing it as a team. Instead of being down and trying to smile, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to anger and frustration and hatred and rage, which at least seemed authentic. At times, it even turned out to appreciate our moments at home together.

This brought to mind of a hope I sometimes see in my counseling individuals, and that I have also seen in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could in some way reverse our unwanted experiences, like pressing a reset button. But that button only looks to the past. Acknowledging the reality that this is not possible and embracing the grief and rage for things not working out how we expected, rather than a insincere positive spin, can facilitate a change of current: from avoidance and sadness, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be transformative.

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 letdown and happiness and life force, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and freedom.

I have often found myself stuck in this urge to erase events, but my young child is helping me to grow out of it. As a recent parent, I was at times swamped by the astonishing demands of my baby. Not only the feeding – sometimes for a lengthy period at a time, and then again less than an hour after that – and not only the diaper swaps, and then the repeating the process before you’ve even completed the change you were handling. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – efficiency blended with affection – are a comfort and a significant blessing. Though they’re also, at moments, persistent and tiring. What shocked me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the feelings requirements.

I had assumed my most important job as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. But I soon realized that it was not possible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her craving could seem unmeetable; my supply could not be produced rapidly, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she hated being changed, and sobbed as if she were plunging into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed consoled by the embraces we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were separated from us, that no comfort we gave could aid.

I soon discovered that my most crucial role as a mother was first to persevere, and then to support her in managing the overwhelming feelings caused by the impossibility of my protecting her from all distress. As she developed her capacity to ingest and absorb milk, she also had to develop a capacity to manage her sentiments and her distress when the supply was insufficient, or when she was hurting, or any other hard and bewildering experience – and I had to develop alongside her (and my) frustration, rage, despair, loathing, discontent, need. My job was not to guarantee smooth experiences, but to help bring meaning to her sentimental path of things not working out ideally.

This was the difference, for her, between having someone who was seeking to offer her only good feelings, and instead being helped to grow a capacity to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the distinction, for me, between wanting to feel wonderful 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 adequately performed – and understand my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The distinction between my trying to stop her crying, and understanding when she needed to cry.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel less keenly the wish to press reverse and change our narrative into one where all is perfect. I find hope in my sense of a capacity growing inside me 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 weep.