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I wish you enjoyed a good summer: mine was not. That day we were planning to take a vacation, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which meant our getaway ideas needed to be cancelled.

From this episode I realized a truth valuable, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to acknowledge pain when things don't work out. I’m not talking about major catastrophes, but the more routine, subtly crushing disappointments that – unless we can actually experience them – will really weigh us down.

When we were expected to be on holiday but could not be, 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 didn't improve, just a bit down. And then I would face the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery necessitated frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a limited time window for an pleasant vacation on the shores of Belgium. So, no getaway. Just discontent and annoyance, pain and care.

I know graver situations can happen, it’s only a holiday, such a fortunate concern to have – I know because I tested that argument too. But what I required was to be truthful to myself. In those instances when I was able to stop fighting off the disappointment and we discussed it instead, it felt like we were sharing an experience. Instead of feeling depressed and trying to appear happy, I’ve granted myself all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to anger and frustration and loathing and fury, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even became possible to enjoy our time at home together.

This reminded me of a wish I sometimes observe in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could in some way reverse our unwanted experiences, like pressing a reset button. But that option only goes in reverse. Confronting the reality that this is unattainable and allowing the grief and rage for things not happening how we anticipated, rather than a insincere positive spin, can enable a shift: from avoidance and sadness, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be profoundly impactful.

We consider depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a pressing down of rage and grief and frustration and delight and energy, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and freedom.

I have repeatedly found myself trapped in this desire to reverse things, but my young child is supporting my evolution. As a new mother, I was at times overwhelmed by the astonishing demands of my baby. Not only the feeding – 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 repeating the process before you’ve even ended the task you were doing. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a solace and a significant blessing. Though they’re also, at moments, persistent and tiring. What surprised me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the emotional demands.

I had thought my most key role as a mother was to fulfill my infant's requirements. But I soon understood that it was unfeasible to meet all 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 despised being changed, and cried as if she were plunging 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 nothing we had to offer could help.

I soon realized that my most crucial role as a mother was first to survive, and then to help her digest the intense emotions provoked by the infeasibility of my shielding her from all distress. As she grew her ability to ingest and absorb milk, she also had to develop a capacity to process her feelings and her suffering when the milk didn’t come, or when she was suffering, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) annoyance, fury, despondency, hatred, disappointment, hunger. My job was not to ensure everything was perfect, but to support in creating understanding to her emotional experience of things not going so well.

This was the contrast, for her, between experiencing someone who was attempting to provide her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being helped to grow a ability to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the contrast, for me, between aiming to have excellent about performing flawlessly as a perfect mother, and instead cultivating the skill to endure my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a good enough job – and comprehend my daughter’s letdown and frustration with me. The contrast between my attempting to halt her crying, and comprehending when she needed to cry.

Now that we have developed beyond this together, I feel not as strongly the desire to press reverse and alter our history into one where everything goes well. I find optimism in my awareness of a ability growing inside me to understand that this is unattainable, and to realize that, when I’m focused on striving to rebook a holiday, what I actually want is to cry.