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I trust your a good summer: my experience was different. The very day we were supposed to be take a vacation, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have urgent but routine surgery, which meant our vacation arrangements needed to be cancelled.

From this episode I realized a truth important, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to acknowledge pain when things go wrong. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more common, subtly crushing disappointments that – unless we can actually experience them – will significantly depress us.

When we were expected to be on holiday but were not, I kept sensing an urge 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 remained low, just a bit depressed. And then I would face the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery necessitated frequent uncomfortable wound care, and there is a finite opportunity for an relaxing trip on the Belgium's beaches. So, no getaway. Just discontent and annoyance, hurt and nurturing.

I know worse things can happen, it's merely a vacation, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I tested that argument too. But what I required was to be truthful to myself. In those instances when I was able to halt battling the disappointment and we talked about 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 granted myself all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and loathing and fury, which at least felt real. At times, it even was feasible to enjoy our time at home together.

This brought to mind of a wish I sometimes observe in my therapy clients, and that I have also experienced in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could perhaps undo our negative events, like clicking “undo”. But that arrow only goes in reverse. Facing the reality that this is unattainable and allowing the grief and rage for things not working out how we anticipated, rather than a false optimism, can promote a transformation: from denial and depression, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be transformative.

We consider depression as experiencing negativity – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a repressing of anger and sadness and disappointment and joy and energy, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but acknowledging every sentiment, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and freedom.

I have repeatedly 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 burdened by the amazing requirements of my baby. Not only the nourishing – sometimes for a lengthy period at a time, and then again less than an hour after that – and not only the outfit alterations, and then the doing it once more before you’ve even completed the change you were doing. These routine valuable duties among so many others – efficiency blended with affection – are a reassurance and a significant blessing. 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 thought my most primary duty as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon realized that it was not possible to meet all of my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her craving could seem unmeetable; my supply could not come fast enough, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to change her – but she hated being changed, and cried as if she were plunging into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed consoled by the hugs we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were lost to us, that no solution we provided could help.

I soon discovered that my most crucial role as a mother was first to persevere, and then to support her in managing the intense emotions triggered by the impossibility of my shielding 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 pain when the milk didn’t come, or when she was suffering, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) irritation, anger, hopelessness, hatred, disappointment, hunger. My job was not to guarantee smooth experiences, but to support in creating understanding to her feelings journey of things being less than perfect.

This was the distinction, for her, between being with someone who was trying to give her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being assisted in developing a ability to feel every emotion. It was the contrast, for me, between desiring to experience great about executing ideally as a perfect mother, and instead cultivating the skill to endure my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a sufficiently well – and understand my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The difference between my attempting to halt her crying, and understanding when she required to weep.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel less keenly the wish to hit “undo” and alter our history into one where everything goes well. I find optimism in my feeling of a capacity evolving internally to understand that this is impossible, and to comprehend that, when I’m busy trying to reschedule a vacation, what I really need is to cry.