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I hope you had a pleasant summer: my experience was different. The very day we were supposed to be go on holiday, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, expecting him to have urgent but routine surgery, which resulted in our getaway ideas were forced to be cancelled.

From this experience I gained insight valuable, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to acknowledge pain when things take a turn. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more common, quietly devastating disappointments that – unless we can actually experience them – will truly burden us.

When we were supposed to be on holiday but were not, 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 didn't improve, just a bit blue. And then I would face the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery involved frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a limited time window for an relaxing trip on the Belgium's beaches. So, no getaway. Just letdown and irritation, pain and care.

I know graver situations can happen, it’s only a holiday, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I tried that line too. But what I needed was to be truthful to myself. In those times when I was able to stop fighting off the disappointment and we talked about it instead, it felt like we were facing it as a team. Instead of feeling depressed and trying to smile, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to anger and frustration and hatred and rage, which at least seemed authentic. At times, it even was feasible to enjoy our time 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 somehow erase our difficult moments, like hitting a reverse switch. But that button only points backwards. Facing the reality that this is not possible and allowing the pain and fury for things not turning out how we hoped, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can promote a transformation: from avoidance and sadness, to development and opportunity. Over time – and, of course, it needs duration – this can be life-changing.

We think of depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of dulling of all emotions, a pressing down of anger and sadness and frustration and delight and vitality, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and liberty.

I have often found myself trapped in this urge to erase events, but my little one is assisting me in moving past it. As a recent parent, I was at times overwhelmed by the amazing requirements of my newborn. Not only the nourishing – sometimes for over an hour at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the diaper swaps, and then the repeating the process before you’ve even ended the task you were changing. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a reassurance 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 assumed my most primary duty as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. But I soon came to realise that it was unfeasible to meet all of my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her hunger could seem unmeetable; my nourishment could not arrive quickly, or it came too fast. And then we needed to alter her clothes – but she disliked being changed, and sobbed as if she were falling into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed consoled by the embraces we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were lost to us, that no comfort we gave could aid.

I soon discovered that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to persevere, and then to help her digest the overwhelming feelings provoked by the impossibility of my shielding her from all unease. As she enhanced her skill to consume and process milk, she also had to develop a capacity to process her feelings and her pain when the milk didn’t come, or when she was in pain, or any other challenging and perplexing 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 assist in finding significance to her sentimental path of things not working out ideally.

This was the distinction, for her, between being with someone who was seeking to offer her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being supported in building a ability to experience all feelings. It was the distinction, for me, between desiring to experience wonderful about doing a perfect job as a flawless caregiver, and instead developing the capacity to tolerate my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a good enough job – and grasp my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The contrast between my seeking to prevent her crying, and recognizing when she had to sob.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel not as strongly the desire to hit “undo” and alter our history into one where all is perfect. I find optimism in my sense of a ability developing within to understand that this is not possible, and to realize that, when I’m busy trying to reschedule a vacation, what I really need is to cry.