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I hope you had a pleasant summer: mine was not. That day we were planning to take a vacation, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have urgent but routine surgery, which caused our getaway ideas had to be cancelled.

From this experience I realized a truth important, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to experience sadness when things go wrong. I’m not talking about major catastrophes, but the more common, gently heartbreaking disappointments that – if we don't actually feel them – will truly burden us.

When we were meant to be on holiday but were not, I kept feeling a tug 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 down. And then I would face the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery necessitated frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a limited time window for an pleasant vacation on the Belgian coast. So, no getaway. Just disappointment and frustration, hurt and nurturing.

I know graver situations can happen, it's just a trip, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I used that reasoning 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 being down and trying to smile, I’ve granted myself all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to anger and frustration and aversion and wrath, which at least felt real. At times, it even became possible to value our days at home together.

This brought to mind of a hope I sometimes see in my counseling individuals, and that I have also seen in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could perhaps reverse our unwanted experiences, like clicking “undo”. But that button only looks to the past. Confronting the reality that this is unattainable and allowing the pain and fury for things not working out how we hoped, rather than a false optimism, can facilitate a change of current: from denial and depression, to development and opportunity. Over time – and, of course, it needs duration – this can be transformative.

We view depression as experiencing negativity – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a suppressing of anger and sadness and letdown and happiness and life force, and all the rest. The substitute for depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and freedom.

I have repeatedly found myself trapped in this wish to erase events, but my little one is helping me to grow out of it. As a new mother, I was at times overwhelmed by the incredible needs 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 changing again before you’ve even ended the change you were doing. These routine valuable duties among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a comfort and a tremendous privilege. Though they’re also, at moments, unceasing and exhausting. What surprised me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the feelings requirements.

I had believed my most primary duty as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. But I soon understood that it was not possible to meet all of my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her craving could seem endless; my nourishment could not be produced rapidly, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she disliked being changed, and wept as if she were plunging into a gloomy abyss of despair. And while sometimes she seemed comforted by the embraces we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were separated from us, that nothing we had to offer could aid.

I soon discovered that my most crucial role as a mother was first to endure, and then to help her digest the intense emotions triggered by the unattainability of my protecting her from all discomfort. As she grew her ability to ingest and absorb milk, she also had to build an ability to digest her emotions and her suffering when the supply was insufficient, or when she was hurting, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to evolve with her (and my) frustration, rage, despair, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to guarantee smooth experiences, but to help bring meaning to her emotional experience of things not working out ideally.

This was the distinction, for her, between experiencing someone who was trying to give her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being assisted in developing a skill to feel every emotion. It was the difference, for me, between wanting to feel wonderful about executing ideally as a ideal parent, and instead developing the capacity to endure my own shortcomings in order to do a good enough job – and understand my daughter’s letdown and frustration with me. The contrast between my trying to stop her crying, and understanding when she had to sob.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel less keenly the desire to press reverse and change our narrative into one where things are ideal. I find hope in my sense of a ability growing inside me to understand that this is impossible, and to realize that, when I’m focused on striving to rearrange a trip, what I really need is to weep.