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I hope you had a pleasant summer: my experience was different. That day we were scheduled to take a vacation, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, expecting him to have urgent but routine surgery, which caused our travel plans were forced to be cancelled.

From this situation I realized a truth important, all over again, about how hard it is for me to feel bad when things take a turn. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more everyday, subtly crushing disappointments that – without the ability to actually experience them – will really weigh us down.

When we were meant to be on holiday but weren't, I kept sensing an urge 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 depressed. And then I would bump up against the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery involved frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a finite opportunity for an relaxing trip on the shores of Belgium. So, no getaway. Just letdown and irritation, pain and care.

I know worse things can happen, it's merely a vacation, such a fortunate concern to have – I know because I used that reasoning too. But what I required 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 going through something together. Instead of being down and trying to smile, I’ve given myself permission all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and hatred and rage, which at least seemed authentic. At times, it even was feasible to value our days at home together.

This brought to mind of a desire I sometimes see in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could perhaps reverse our unwanted experiences, like hitting a reverse switch. But that option only goes in reverse. Acknowledging the reality that this is not possible and embracing the sorrow and anger for things not turning out how we expected, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can enable a shift: from denial and depression, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be profoundly impactful.

We consider depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of deadening of all emotions, a pressing down of anger and sadness and frustration and delight and energy, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of honest emotional expression and release.

I have frequently found myself caught in this urge to erase events, but my toddler is helping me to grow out of it. As a first-time mom, I was at times burdened by the incredible needs of my infant. 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 repeating the process before you’ve even finished the swap you were handling. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a solace and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What astounded me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the psychological needs.

I had assumed my most primary duty as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. But I soon realized that it was unfeasible to meet all of my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her craving could seem unmeetable; my milk could not be produced rapidly, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to change her – but she despised being changed, and sobbed as if she were descending into a gloomy abyss of despair. And while sometimes she seemed consoled by the hugs we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were distant from us, that no solution we provided could aid.

I soon learned that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to survive, and then to assist her process the intense emotions triggered by the impossibility of my protecting 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 pain when the milk didn’t come, or when she was in pain, or any other hard and bewildering experience – and I had to evolve with her (and my) irritation, anger, hopelessness, loathing, discontent, need. My job was not to make things go well, but to help bring meaning to her feelings journey of things not working out ideally.

This was the contrast, for her, between being with someone who was seeking to offer her only good feelings, and instead being supported in building a ability to experience all feelings. It was the difference, for me, between desiring to experience wonderful about performing flawlessly as a flawless caregiver, and instead developing the capacity to accept my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a adequately performed – and understand my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The contrast between my trying to stop her crying, and comprehending when she had to sob.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel less keenly the urge to press reverse and rewrite our story into one where things are ideal. I find faith in my awareness of a ability growing inside me to acknowledge that this is unattainable, and to understand that, when I’m focused on striving to rearrange a trip, what I really need is to cry.