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I hope you had a good summer: my experience was different. On the day we were scheduled to take a vacation, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, expecting him to have prompt but common surgery, which meant our travel plans needed to be cancelled.

From this episode I gained insight valuable, all over again, about how hard it is for me to feel bad when things take a turn. I’m not talking about major catastrophes, but the more everyday, quietly devastating disappointments that – unless we can actually experience them – will really weigh us down.

When we were expected to be on holiday but were not, I kept sensing an urge towards looking for silver linings: “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 down. And then I would bump up against 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 enjoyable break on the Belgian coast. So, no getaway. Just discontent and annoyance, hurt and nurturing.

I know graver situations can happen, it’s only a holiday, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I tried that line too. But what I required was to be honest with myself. In those moments when I was able to halt battling the disappointment and we talked about it instead, it felt like we were facing it as a team. Instead of being down and trying to put on a brave face, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of unpleasant emotions, 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 brought to mind of a wish I sometimes notice in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also experienced in myself as a individual in analysis: 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 unattainable and embracing the grief and rage for things not working out how we anticipated, rather than a insincere positive spin, can enable a shift: from denial and depression, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be life-changing.

We consider depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of dulling of all emotions, a repressing of anger and sadness and disappointment and joy and vitality, and all the rest. The substitute for depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of honest emotional expression and freedom.

I have repeatedly found myself caught in this wish to click “undo”, but my toddler is supporting my evolution. As a new mother, I was at times burdened by the incredible needs of my infant. Not only the nursing – sometimes for more than 60 minutes at a time, and then again under 60 minutes after that – and not only the outfit alterations, and then the changing again before you’ve even completed the change you were handling. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – efficiency blended with affection – are a comfort and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, persistent and tiring. 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 fulfill my infant's requirements. But I soon came to realise that it was unfeasible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her craving could seem unmeetable; my milk could not be produced rapidly, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she despised being changed, and sobbed as if she were descending into a shadowy pit of misery. And while sometimes she seemed comforted 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 realized that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to endure, and then to assist her process the intense emotions triggered by the unattainability of my protecting her from all distress. As she developed her capacity to consume and process milk, she also had to build an ability to process her feelings and her suffering when the supply was insufficient, or when she was in pain, or any other challenging and perplexing experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) irritation, anger, hopelessness, hatred, disappointment, hunger. My job was not to make things go well, but to assist in finding significance to her emotional experience of things being less than perfect.

This was the distinction, for her, between being with someone who was attempting to provide her only good feelings, and instead being assisted in developing a capacity to experience all feelings. It was the distinction, for me, between aiming to have excellent about executing ideally as a ideal parent, and instead building the ability to endure my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a sufficiently well – and comprehend my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The contrast between my seeking to prevent her crying, and recognizing when she required to weep.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel reduced the urge to hit “undo” and change our narrative into one where all is perfect. I find optimism in my feeling of a capacity evolving internally to acknowledge that this is not possible, and to comprehend that, when I’m busy trying to reschedule a vacation, what I actually want is to cry.