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I wish you enjoyed a enjoyable summer: my experience was different. That day we were supposed to be go on holiday, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which resulted in our vacation arrangements had to be cancelled.

From this episode I gained insight significant, all over again, about how hard it is for me to acknowledge pain when things don't work out. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more common, subtly crushing disappointments that – without the ability to actually feel them – will truly burden us.

When we were meant to be on holiday but weren't, I kept feeling a tug 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 never felt better, 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 uncomfortable wound care, and there is a finite opportunity for an pleasant vacation on the shores of Belgium. So, no holiday. Just discontent and annoyance, suffering and attention.

I know graver situations can happen, it's merely a vacation, such a fortunate concern to have – I know because I used that reasoning too. But what I wanted was to be truthful to myself. In those instances when I was able to halt battling the disappointment and we discussed it instead, it felt like we were going through something together. Instead of being down and trying to appear happy, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to anger and frustration and loathing and fury, which at least seemed authentic. At times, it even turned out to value our days at home together.

This recalled of a wish I sometimes notice in my counseling individuals, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could in some way reverse our unwanted experiences, like hitting a reverse switch. But that button only points backwards. Acknowledging the reality that this is not possible and allowing the pain and fury for things not happening how we anticipated, rather than a insincere positive spin, 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 view depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of deadening of all emotions, a repressing of rage and grief and frustration and delight and life force, 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 often found myself stuck in this desire to erase events, but my little one is helping me to grow out of it. As a recent parent, I was at times swamped by the astonishing demands of my newborn. Not only the nourishing – sometimes for over an hour 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 everyday important activities among so many others – efficiency blended with affection – are a comfort and a great honor. 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 realized that it was impossible to meet all of my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her craving could seem unmeetable; my milk could not be produced rapidly, 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 consoled by the cuddles 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 key responsibility as a mother was first to endure, and then to support her in managing the intense emotions provoked by the unattainability of my shielding 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 distress when the nourishment was delayed, or when she was suffering, or any other challenging and perplexing experience – and I had to evolve with her (and my) frustration, rage, despair, hatred, disappointment, hunger. My job was not to make things go well, but to help bring meaning to her sentimental path of things being less than perfect.

This was the contrast, for her, between having someone who was seeking to offer her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being supported in building a capacity to feel every emotion. 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 imperfections in order to do a good enough job – and comprehend my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The contrast between my attempting to halt her crying, and understanding when she needed to cry.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel not as strongly the desire to hit “undo” and rewrite our story into one where things are ideal. I find hope in my sense of a capacity growing inside me to acknowledge that this is unattainable, and to comprehend that, when I’m busy trying to rebook a holiday, what I really need is to sob.