Like a toppled wine glass slowly staining the Seder table, sometimes grief spills out and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. Sometimes holidays are just friggin’ hard.

I have become more self-aware about navigating through holidays over the years, and much of the time I make a point ahead of time of gauging how I’m feeling. I try to check in with myself. But sometimes I’m just too caught up in my very busy day-to-day, and my emotions overtake me when I’m not paying attention. It’s the difference between carefully pouring your wine so you don’t give yourself too much, and losing focus so your pouring becomes suddenly too heavy handed and the glass overfills.

I was fine. I was handling it. I was in the moment.

And then my phone dinged with a text message from my aunt, my father’s sister, very nearly the only family I have left. It was just a simple message wishing me a happy holiday. But it sent me into a downward spiral of memory and deep aching loss that I tried, and failed, to choke down because we were just starting the Seder at my in-laws’ house. It was like someone had pulled out the plug in the sink and all the emotions I’d been holding together got rapidly sucked down a drain, and my self-control along with it. I only made it through the first blessing over the wine before I needed to excuse myself, and the grief overtook me once I got upstairs.

For someone who spent her whole life compartmentalizing and historically has been extremely good at it, I’ve been working hard to let myself have my feelings, to let them run their course. So, instead of trying to curtail my grief and force the tears away so I could return to the Seder as soon as possible, I let myself cry it out for a little while. The only way out is through; if you don’t make time for your grief, it will take the time it needs from you whether it’s convenient or not (and let’s face it, it’s never a convenient time to feel pain like that).

My husband eventually came to check on me and comforted me, and I returned to the table a few minutes later. I almost lost it again when we sang “Dayenu” which holds special meaning for me because, it being similar to my first name, my family used to also do a chorus of “Diana” just for fun. But I was able to hold it together and we got through the rest of the Seder and meal and dessert without further upset. The grief was still present but had stopped overflowing.

When I first stopped talking to my toxic narcissist of a mother and realized that what holidays used to be like for me were going to be vastly different, my therapist helped me come to terms with that by suggesting that I redefine each holiday for myself. I can take each holiday and choose how to observe it (or to not observe it at all). I can make it work for myself and my husband and daughter, find and reinforce the meaning that I find valuable and relevant. I would say that this has been successful so far with some holidays more than others, and it is Passover which has proven hardest for me to make sense of in my current context, compared to the rest. I still haven’t figured Passover out.

The only thing I’ve figured out — and almost forgot this year — is that when the grief runneth over, you have to let it. You have to let the grief stain the tablecloth. Those stains become an irrevocable part of holiday tradition too.