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I trust your a enjoyable summer: I did not. On the day we were scheduled to travel for leisure, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, expecting him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which resulted in our vacation arrangements needed to be cancelled.

From this situation I realized a truth significant, 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, gently heartbreaking disappointments that – without the ability to actually acknowledge them – will truly burden us.

When we were meant to be on holiday but could not be, 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 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 required frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a limited time window for an relaxing trip on the Belgium's beaches. So, no vacation. Just discontent and annoyance, suffering and attention.

I know worse things can happen, it’s only a holiday, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I used that reasoning too. But what I wanted was to be honest with myself. In those instances when I was able to stop fighting off the disappointment and we discussed it instead, it felt like we were facing it as a team. Instead of being down and trying to appear happy, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and hatred and rage, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even was feasible to appreciate our moments at home together.

This reminded me of a wish I sometimes notice in my counseling individuals, and that I have also experienced in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could perhaps undo our negative events, like clicking “undo”. But that button only goes in reverse. Confronting the reality that this is unattainable and accepting the pain and fury for things not working out how we expected, rather than a false optimism, can enable a shift: from rejection and low mood, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be profoundly impactful.

We consider depression as experiencing negativity – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a repressing of rage and grief and frustration and delight and vitality, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and release.

I have repeatedly found myself trapped in this urge to erase events, but my toddler is helping me to grow out of it. As a recent parent, I was at times overwhelmed by the astonishing demands of my infant. 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 changing, and then the repeating the process before you’ve even completed the task you were handling. These routine valuable duties among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a comfort and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What surprised me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the emotional demands.

I had thought my most primary duty as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. But I soon realized that it was impossible to meet all of my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her hunger could seem unmeetable; my supply could not be produced rapidly, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to change her – but she disliked being changed, and wept as if she were falling into a gloomy abyss of despair. 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 solution we provided could help.

I soon realized that my most crucial role as a mother was first to persevere, and then to help her digest the powerful sentiments triggered by the unattainability of my shielding her from all distress. As she grew her ability to consume and process milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to digest her emotions and her pain when the milk didn’t come, or when she was hurting, or any other challenging and perplexing experience – and I had to develop alongside her (and my) irritation, anger, hopelessness, loathing, discontent, need. My job was not to ensure everything was perfect, but to help bring meaning to her emotional experience of things not working out ideally.

This was the distinction, for her, between experiencing someone who was seeking to offer her only good feelings, and instead being supported in building a capacity to experience all feelings. It was the distinction, for me, between desiring to experience excellent about executing ideally as a perfect mother, and instead developing the capacity to tolerate my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a sufficiently well – and understand my daughter’s letdown and frustration with me. The distinction between my attempting to halt her crying, and comprehending when she needed to cry.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel not as strongly the desire to hit “undo” and rewrite our story into one where everything goes well. I find hope in my awareness of a skill developing within to understand that this is impossible, and to realize that, when I’m focused on striving to rebook a holiday, what I truly require is to cry.