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I wish you enjoyed a good summer: my experience was different. The very day we were planning to go on holiday, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have prompt but common surgery, which caused our getaway ideas needed to be cancelled.

From this situation I realized a truth important, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to acknowledge pain when things take a turn. I’m not talking about major catastrophes, but the more common, subtly crushing disappointments that – without the ability to actually experience them – will truly burden us.

When we were meant to be on holiday but were not, I kept feeling a tug 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 didn't improve, just a bit blue. And then I would confront the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery necessitated frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a short period for an pleasant vacation on the Belgian coast. So, no vacation. Just disappointment and frustration, pain and care.

I know graver situations can happen, it's just a trip, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I tested that argument too. But what I needed was to be truthful to myself. In those moments when I was able to halt battling the disappointment and we addressed it instead, it felt like we were facing it as a team. Instead of feeling depressed and trying to put on a brave face, I’ve granted myself all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and loathing and fury, which at least seemed authentic. At times, it even turned out to value our days at home together.

This reminded me of a wish I sometimes observe in my therapy clients, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could somehow undo our negative events, like pressing a reset button. But that option only looks to the past. Facing the reality that this is impossible and allowing the sorrow and anger for things not happening how we expected, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can enable a shift: from avoidance and sadness, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it needs duration – this can be profoundly impactful.

We consider depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of dulling of all emotions, a repressing of anger and sadness and frustration and delight and life force, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and freedom.

I have repeatedly found myself caught in this wish to click “undo”, but my toddler is supporting my evolution. As a recent parent, I was at times overwhelmed by the incredible needs of my infant. 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 diaper swaps, and then the changing again before you’ve even ended the task you were changing. These everyday important activities among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a solace and a significant blessing. Though they’re also, at moments, unceasing and exhausting. What surprised 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 meet my baby’s needs. But I soon understood that it was impossible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her hunger could seem unmeetable; my nourishment could not arrive quickly, or it came too fast. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she disliked being changed, and cried as if she were falling into a shadowy pit of misery. And while sometimes she seemed soothed by the embraces we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were distant from us, that no solution we provided could assist.

I soon discovered that my most important job as a mother was first to survive, and then to assist her process the powerful sentiments triggered by the unattainability of my guarding her from all discomfort. As she enhanced her skill to ingest and absorb milk, she also had to develop a capacity to process her feelings and her suffering when the supply was insufficient, or when she was hurting, or any other challenging and perplexing experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) frustration, rage, despair, aversion, letdown, craving. 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 having someone who was trying to give her only positive emotions, and instead being supported in building a ability to feel every emotion. It was the contrast, for me, between desiring to experience wonderful about executing ideally as a perfect mother, and instead developing the capacity to accept my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a good enough job – and comprehend my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The distinction between my attempting to halt her crying, and recognizing when she required to weep.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel less keenly the desire to click erase and alter our history into one where everything goes well. I find faith in my awareness of a ability evolving internally to understand that this is unattainable, and to understand that, when I’m busy trying to rearrange a trip, what I truly require is to sob.