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I trust your a pleasant summer: mine was not. That day we were planning to travel for leisure, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have prompt but common surgery, which meant our getaway ideas needed to be cancelled.

From this situation I learned something important, 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 routine, gently heartbreaking disappointments that – if we don't actually experience them – will really weigh us down.

When we were meant to be on holiday but were not, I kept experiencing a pull 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 never felt better, just a bit depressed. And then I would face 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 pleasant vacation on the Belgian coast. So, no holiday. Just disappointment and frustration, hurt and nurturing.

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 required was to be sincere with my feelings. In those moments when I was able to cease resisting the disappointment and we addressed it instead, it felt like we were sharing an experience. Instead of feeling depressed and trying to put on a brave face, I’ve given myself permission all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and aversion and wrath, which at least felt real. At times, it even was feasible to value our days at home together.

This brought to mind of a wish I sometimes notice in my counseling individuals, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could somehow reverse our unwanted experiences, like pressing a reset button. But that button only points backwards. Confronting the reality that this is unattainable and allowing the sorrow and anger for things not happening how we hoped, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can facilitate a change of current: from avoidance and sadness, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be profoundly impactful.

We consider depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a suppressing of anger and sadness and letdown and happiness and vitality, 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 stuck in this wish to click “undo”, but my young child is supporting my evolution. As a first-time mom, I was at times overwhelmed by the amazing requirements of my newborn. Not only the nourishing – sometimes for a lengthy period at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the diaper swaps, and then the repeating the process before you’ve even finished the change you were doing. These everyday important activities among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a comfort and a significant blessing. Though they’re also, at moments, unceasing and exhausting. What astounded me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the feelings requirements.

I had thought my most primary duty as a mother was to fulfill my infant's requirements. But I soon realized that it was unfeasible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her craving could seem endless; my milk could not come fast enough, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to change her – but she hated being changed, and wept as if she were falling into a gloomy abyss of despair. And while sometimes she seemed soothed by the hugs we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were distant from us, that no comfort we gave could help.

I soon learned that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to survive, and then to assist her process the intense emotions provoked by the unattainability of my protecting her from all unease. As she enhanced her skill to consume and process milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to process her feelings and her suffering 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, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to ensure everything was perfect, but to assist in finding significance to her sentimental path of things not working out ideally.

This was the contrast, for her, between being with someone who was attempting to provide her only good feelings, and instead being assisted in developing a ability to feel every emotion. It was the distinction, for me, between aiming to have wonderful about performing flawlessly as a ideal parent, and instead cultivating the skill to endure my own shortcomings in order to do a sufficiently well – and understand my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The difference between my seeking to prevent her crying, and comprehending when she had to sob.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel less keenly the urge to press reverse and change our narrative into one where all is perfect. I find hope in my awareness of a ability developing within to recognise that this is not possible, and to comprehend that, when I’m busy trying to reschedule a vacation, what I really need is to sob.