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I hope you had a pleasant summer: I did not. On the day we were supposed to be go on holiday, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which caused our vacation arrangements needed to be cancelled.

From this experience I gained insight significant, all over again, about how hard it is for me to experience sadness when things take a turn. I’m not talking about major catastrophes, but the more common, quietly devastating 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 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 down. And then I would confront the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery involved frequent uncomfortable wound care, and there is a finite opportunity for an relaxing trip on the Belgian coast. So, no vacation. 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 tested that argument too. But what I wanted was to be sincere with my feelings. In those moments when I was able to cease resisting the disappointment and we talked about it instead, it felt like we were facing it as a team. Instead of experiencing sadness and trying to appear happy, I’ve granted myself all sorts of unpleasant emotions, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and loathing and fury, which at least seemed authentic. At times, it even turned out to appreciate our moments at home together.

This recalled of a desire I sometimes observe in my therapy clients, and that I have also seen in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could perhaps erase our difficult moments, like hitting a reverse switch. But that arrow only looks to the past. Acknowledging the reality that this is unattainable and allowing the pain and fury for things not happening how we hoped, rather than a insincere positive spin, can enable a shift: from avoidance and sadness, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be transformative.

We view depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of dulling of all emotions, a repressing of anger and sadness and letdown and happiness and energy, and all the rest. The substitute for depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of honest emotional expression and freedom.

I have frequently found myself trapped in this desire 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 incredible needs of my newborn. Not only the feeding – sometimes for more than 60 minutes at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the outfit alterations, and then the doing it once more before you’ve even ended the change you were changing. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a comfort and a significant blessing. Though they’re also, at moments, persistent and tiring. 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 meet my baby’s needs. But I soon realized that it was not possible to meet all of my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her appetite could seem endless; my nourishment could not be produced rapidly, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to alter her clothes – but she disliked being changed, and cried as if she were descending into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed soothed by the embraces we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were distant from us, that no solution we provided could aid.

I soon discovered that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to endure, and then to support her in managing the intense emotions triggered by the infeasibility of my shielding her from all discomfort. As she developed her capacity to take in and digest milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to digest her emotions and her pain when the nourishment was delayed, or when she was in pain, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to evolve with 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 sentimental path of things being less than perfect.

This was the distinction, for her, between having someone who was trying to give her only positive emotions, and instead being assisted in developing a ability to experience all feelings. It was the distinction, for me, between wanting to feel excellent about executing ideally as a ideal parent, and instead building the ability to accept my own imperfections in order to do a good enough job – and understand my daughter’s letdown and frustration with me. The contrast between my seeking to prevent her crying, and recognizing when she needed to cry.

Now that we have developed beyond this together, I feel reduced the urge to hit “undo” and alter our history into one where everything goes well. I find faith in my feeling of a ability evolving internally to acknowledge that this is not possible, and to understand that, when I’m busy trying to reschedule a vacation, what I truly require is to sob.