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

From this episode 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 acknowledge them – will really weigh us down.

When we were meant to be on holiday but could not be, I kept experiencing a pull 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 remained low, just a bit blue. And then I would bump up against the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery required frequent uncomfortable wound care, and there is a limited time window for an relaxing trip on the shores of Belgium. So, no vacation. Just letdown and irritation, hurt and nurturing.

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 honest with myself. In those moments when I was able to cease resisting the disappointment and we addressed it instead, it felt like we were sharing an experience. Instead of feeling depressed and trying to smile, I’ve given myself permission 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 became possible to enjoy our time at home together.

This reminded me of a desire I sometimes notice in my therapy clients, and that I have also seen in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could in some way undo our negative events, like clicking “undo”. But that button only points backwards. Acknowledging the reality that this is impossible and allowing the pain and fury for things not turning out how we hoped, rather than a false optimism, can enable a shift: from avoidance and sadness, to development and opportunity. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be profoundly impactful.

We think of depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of dulling of all emotions, a repressing of rage and grief and disappointment and joy and energy, and all the rest. The substitute for depression is not happiness, but acknowledging every sentiment, a kind of honest emotional expression and release.

I have often found myself trapped in this urge to reverse things, but my young child is assisting me in moving past it. As a recent parent, I was at times overwhelmed by the incredible needs of my infant. Not only the feeding – 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 changing again before you’ve even ended the swap you were doing. These routine valuable duties among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a comfort and a tremendous privilege. Though they’re also, at moments, unceasing and exhausting. What shocked me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the emotional demands.

I had thought my most primary duty as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. But I soon understood that it was unfeasible to meet all of my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her craving could seem endless; my supply could not come fast enough, or it came too fast. And then we needed to change her – but she despised being changed, and wept as if she were descending into a gloomy abyss of despair. 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 nothing we had to offer could help.

I soon realized that my most important job as a mother was first to endure, and then to assist her process the overwhelming feelings caused by the impossibility of my protecting her from all unease. As she developed her capacity to ingest and absorb milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to manage her sentiments and her pain when the nourishment was delayed, or when she was suffering, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to develop alongside her (and my) frustration, rage, despair, loathing, discontent, need. My job was not to make things go well, but to help bring meaning to her emotional experience of things being less than perfect.

This was the contrast, for her, between being with someone who was seeking to offer her only positive emotions, and instead being supported in building a capacity to feel every emotion. It was the contrast, for me, between desiring to experience excellent about performing flawlessly as a perfect mother, and instead cultivating the skill to accept my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a adequately performed – and comprehend my daughter’s letdown and frustration with me. The distinction between my seeking to prevent her crying, and recognizing when she had to sob.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel less keenly the desire to click erase and rewrite our story into one where things are ideal. I find faith in my sense of a capacity developing within to acknowledge that this is unattainable, and to understand that, when I’m busy trying to rearrange a trip, what I really need is to sob.