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I hope you had a enjoyable summer: my experience was different. The very day we were supposed to be go on holiday, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have urgent but routine surgery, which resulted in our vacation arrangements needed to be cancelled.

From this situation I gained insight significant, all over again, about how hard it is for me to acknowledge pain when things go wrong. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more everyday, subtly crushing disappointments that – unless we can actually acknowledge them – will significantly depress us.

When we were expected to be on holiday but could not be, I kept feeling a tug 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 blue. And then I would bump up against the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery required frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a finite opportunity for an relaxing trip on the Belgian coast. So, no holiday. Just discontent and annoyance, suffering and attention.

I know graver situations can happen, it’s only a holiday, what a privileged problem to have – I know because I tested that argument too. But what I wanted was to be sincere with my feelings. In those times when I was able to halt battling the disappointment and we talked about it instead, it felt like we were sharing an experience. Instead of feeling depressed and trying to appear happy, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to anger and frustration and hatred and rage, which at least felt real. At times, it even turned out to appreciate our moments at home together.

This reminded me of a desire I sometimes see in my counseling individuals, and that I have also seen in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could in some way reverse our unwanted experiences, like hitting a reverse switch. But that option only looks to the past. Confronting the reality that this is impossible and embracing the sorrow and anger for things not turning out how we expected, rather than a insincere positive spin, can facilitate a change of current: from avoidance and sadness, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be life-changing.

We think of depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of dulling of all emotions, a pressing down of frustration and sorrow and frustration and delight and life force, and all the rest. The substitute for depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and liberty.

I have repeatedly found myself trapped in this wish to erase events, but my little one is supporting my evolution. As a first-time mom, I was at times burdened by the amazing requirements of my baby. Not only the nourishing – sometimes for a lengthy period at a time, and then again less than an hour after that – and not only the diaper swaps, and then the repeating the process before you’ve even ended the change you were changing. These routine valuable duties among so many others – efficiency blended with affection – are a reassurance and a significant blessing. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What astounded me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the emotional demands.

I had believed my most key role as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. But I soon realized that it was impossible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her appetite could seem unmeetable; my supply could not be produced rapidly, or it came too fast. And then we needed to alter her clothes – but she despised being changed, and cried as if she were falling into a shadowy pit of misery. And while sometimes she seemed soothed by the cuddles we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were lost to us, that nothing we had to offer could help.

I soon realized that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to persevere, and then to assist her process the powerful sentiments caused by the unattainability of my protecting her from all distress. As she enhanced her skill to consume and process milk, she also had to build an ability to process her feelings and her pain when the milk didn’t come, or when she was in pain, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to evolve with 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 feelings journey of things not going so well.

This was the difference, for her, between being with someone who was trying to give 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 tolerate my own imperfections in order to do a adequately performed – and grasp my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The distinction between my trying to stop her crying, and understanding when she required to weep.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel not as strongly the wish to hit “undo” and change our narrative into one where all is perfect. I find optimism in my feeling of a ability growing inside me to recognise that this is impossible, and to understand that, when I’m occupied with attempting to rebook a holiday, what I actually want is to weep.