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I wish you enjoyed a good summer: I did not. That day we were scheduled to travel for leisure, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, expecting him to have prompt but common surgery, which meant our vacation arrangements needed to be cancelled.

From this episode I gained insight important, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to feel bad when things take a turn. I’m not talking about major catastrophes, but the more routine, quietly devastating disappointments that – without the ability to actually feel them – will truly burden us.

When we were supposed to be on holiday but weren't, 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 never felt better, just a bit down. And then I would bump up against the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery involved frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a finite opportunity for an relaxing trip on the Belgium's beaches. So, no getaway. Just disappointment and frustration, suffering and attention.

I know worse things can happen, it's just a trip, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I used that reasoning too. But what I wanted was to be truthful to myself. In those times when I was able to cease resisting the disappointment and we discussed it instead, it felt like we were facing it as a team. Instead of being down and trying to appear happy, I’ve granted myself all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and aversion and wrath, which at least felt real. At times, it even turned out to value our days at home together.

This recalled of a desire I sometimes observe in my counseling individuals, and that I have also experienced in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could somehow erase our difficult moments, like clicking “undo”. But that option only goes in reverse. Facing the reality that this is unattainable and embracing the pain and fury for things not working out how we anticipated, 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 think of 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 letdown and happiness and life force, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and liberty.

I have repeatedly found myself caught in this wish to reverse things, but my little one is supporting my evolution. As a new mother, I was at times swamped by the amazing requirements of my infant. Not only the nourishing – sometimes for over an hour at a time, and then again under 60 minutes after that – and not only the changing, and then the doing it once more before you’ve even finished the swap you were doing. These routine valuable duties among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a solace and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, persistent and tiring. What shocked me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the emotional demands.

I had thought my most important job as a mother was to fulfill my infant's requirements. But I soon came to realise that it was impossible to fulfill each 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 came too fast. 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 cuddles we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were distant from us, that no comfort we gave could aid.

I soon learned that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to persevere, and then to assist her process the intense emotions caused by the infeasibility of my shielding her from all distress. As she grew her ability to consume and process milk, she also had to develop a capacity to process her feelings and her distress when the nourishment was delayed, or when she was suffering, or any other challenging and perplexing experience – and I had to evolve with her (and my) annoyance, fury, despondency, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to guarantee smooth experiences, but to support in creating understanding to her sentimental path of things being less than perfect.

This was the contrast, for her, between being with someone who was seeking to offer her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being assisted in developing a ability to experience all feelings. It was the contrast, for me, between aiming to have great about performing flawlessly as a perfect mother, and instead developing the capacity to tolerate my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a adequately performed – and understand my daughter’s letdown and frustration with me. The difference between my trying to stop her crying, and recognizing when she had to sob.

Now that we have developed beyond this together, I feel not as strongly the urge to hit “undo” and alter our history into one where things are ideal. I find optimism in my sense of a skill developing within to acknowledge that this is unattainable, and to understand that, when I’m occupied with attempting to rebook a holiday, what I actually want is to cry.