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I hope you had a pleasant summer: I did not. The very day we were scheduled to travel for leisure, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have urgent but routine surgery, which resulted in our getaway ideas were forced to be cancelled.

From this situation I gained insight valuable, all over again, about how hard it is for me to feel bad when things go wrong. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more everyday, quietly devastating disappointments that – without the ability to actually experience them – will significantly depress us.

When we were expected to be on holiday but weren't, I kept sensing an urge towards seeking optimism: “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 blue. And then I would confront the reality that this holiday had truly vanished: my husband’s surgery involved frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a finite opportunity for an relaxing trip on the Belgian coast. So, no getaway. Just letdown and irritation, suffering and attention.

I know graver situations can happen, it’s only a holiday, such a fortunate concern to have – I know because I tried that line too. But what I wanted was to be truthful to myself. In those instances when I was able to stop fighting off the disappointment and we addressed it instead, it felt like we were sharing an experience. Instead of experiencing sadness and trying to appear happy, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and hatred and rage, which at least felt real. At times, it even turned out to appreciate our moments 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 individual in analysis: that therapy could somehow undo our negative events, like hitting a reverse switch. But that button only looks to the past. Facing the reality that this is impossible and allowing the pain and fury for things not working out how we hoped, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can promote a transformation: from denial and depression, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be life-changing.

We view depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of dulling of all emotions, a repressing of anger and sadness and frustration and delight and energy, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of honest emotional expression and release.

I have frequently found myself caught in this wish to click “undo”, but my young child is helping me to grow out of it. As a first-time mom, I was at times overwhelmed by the amazing requirements of my newborn. Not only the nursing – sometimes for more than 60 minutes at a time, and then again less than an hour after that – and not only the changing, 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 reassurance and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What surprised me the most – aside from the sleep deprivation – were the psychological needs.

I had thought 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 satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her craving could seem endless; my nourishment could not come fast enough, or it came too fast. And then we needed to alter her clothes – but she disliked being changed, and wept as if she were falling into a shadowy pit of misery. And while sometimes she seemed comforted by the hugs we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were distant from us, that no solution we provided could aid.

I soon learned that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to endure, and then to help her digest the powerful sentiments caused by the infeasibility of my protecting her from all discomfort. As she developed her capacity to ingest and absorb milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to process her feelings and her pain when the supply was insufficient, or when she was in pain, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to grow through 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 feelings journey of things not going so well.

This was the distinction, for her, between being with someone who was seeking to offer her only good feelings, and instead being helped to grow a skill to experience all feelings. It was the contrast, for me, between desiring to experience great about performing flawlessly as a ideal parent, and instead developing the capacity to tolerate my own imperfections in order to do a sufficiently well – and understand my daughter’s letdown and frustration with me. The contrast between my attempting to halt her crying, and understanding when she needed to cry.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel less keenly the desire to press reverse and alter our history into one where everything goes well. I find faith in my feeling of a ability growing inside me to recognise that this is not possible, and to comprehend that, when I’m focused on striving to rebook a holiday, what I actually want is to cry.