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I trust your a enjoyable summer: mine was not. The very day we were supposed to be take a vacation, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which resulted in our vacation arrangements needed to be cancelled.

From this situation I realized a truth valuable, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to acknowledge pain when things take a turn. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more common, quietly devastating disappointments that – if we don't actually acknowledge them – will significantly depress us.

When we were expected to be on holiday but could not be, I kept sensing an urge 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 never felt better, just a bit blue. And then I would bump up against the reality that this holiday had truly vanished: my husband’s surgery necessitated frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a short period for an pleasant vacation on the shores of Belgium. So, no vacation. Just discontent and annoyance, hurt and nurturing.

I know graver situations can happen, it's merely a vacation, what a privileged problem to have – I know because I tested that argument too. But what I needed was to be sincere with my feelings. In those instances when I was able to stop fighting off the disappointment and we talked about it instead, it felt like we were going through something together. Instead of experiencing sadness and trying to appear happy, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of unpleasant emotions, including but not limited to anger and frustration and hatred and rage, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even became possible to appreciate our moments at home together.

This brought to mind of a wish I sometimes see in my therapy clients, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could perhaps erase our difficult moments, like hitting a reverse switch. But that arrow only looks to the past. Confronting the reality that this is impossible and accepting the grief and rage for things not turning out how we expected, rather than a false optimism, can facilitate a change of current: from avoidance and sadness, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be transformative.

We think of depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of deadening of all emotions, a repressing of rage and grief and letdown and happiness and energy, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but acknowledging every sentiment, a kind of honest emotional expression and freedom.

I have often found myself stuck in this urge to reverse things, but my young child is helping me to grow out of it. As a recent parent, I was at times overwhelmed by the incredible needs of my baby. Not only the nursing – 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 finished the task you were handling. These routine valuable duties among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a solace and a tremendous privilege. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What astounded me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the emotional demands.

I had believed my most primary duty as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon realized that it was impossible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her hunger could seem unmeetable; my nourishment could not be produced rapidly, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she disliked being changed, and wept as if she were falling into a dark vortex of doom. 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 nothing we had to offer could aid.

I soon realized that my most important job as a mother was first to persevere, and then to assist her process the powerful sentiments triggered by the unattainability of my protecting her from all discomfort. As she enhanced her skill to consume and process milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to manage her sentiments and her suffering when the nourishment was delayed, or when she was in pain, 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 support in creating understanding to her emotional experience of things being less than perfect.

This was the contrast, for her, between experiencing 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 difference, for me, between aiming to have wonderful about doing a perfect job as a ideal parent, and instead developing the capacity to accept my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a sufficiently well – and comprehend my daughter’s letdown and frustration with me. The contrast between my trying to stop her crying, and understanding when she needed to cry.

Now that we have developed beyond this together, I feel reduced the urge to press reverse and change our narrative into one where everything goes well. I find faith in my sense of a skill evolving internally to understand that this is unattainable, and to realize that, when I’m occupied with attempting to rebook a holiday, what I actually want is to cry.