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I wish you enjoyed a pleasant summer: my experience was different. That day we were supposed to be travel for leisure, I was waiting at 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 episode I gained insight valuable, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to acknowledge pain when things take a turn. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more everyday, subtly crushing disappointments that – if we don't actually acknowledge them – will really weigh us down.

When we were expected to be on holiday but were not, I kept sensing an urge 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 remained low, just a bit depressed. And then I would face the reality that this holiday had truly vanished: my husband’s surgery required frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a limited time window for an enjoyable break on the Belgium's beaches. So, no holiday. Just letdown and irritation, hurt and nurturing.

I know worse things can happen, it's merely a vacation, what a privileged problem 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 facing it as a team. Instead of being down and trying to appear happy, I’ve granted myself all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to anger and frustration and loathing and fury, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even became possible to appreciate our moments at home together.

This recalled of a desire I sometimes notice in my therapy clients, and that I have also experienced in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could in some way reverse our unwanted experiences, like hitting a reverse switch. But that option only points backwards. Confronting the reality that this is impossible and embracing the pain and fury for things not turning out how we expected, rather than a insincere positive spin, can enable a shift: from avoidance and sadness, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be life-changing.

We view depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of deadening of all emotions, a repressing of anger and sadness and disappointment and joy and life force, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of honest emotional expression and liberty.

I have frequently found myself stuck in this desire to click “undo”, but my young child is helping me to grow out of it. As a new mother, I was at times burdened by the amazing requirements of my infant. Not only the nursing – sometimes for a lengthy period at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the changing, and then the repeating the process before you’ve even finished the swap you were changing. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – efficiency blended with affection – are a reassurance and a tremendous privilege. 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 meet my baby’s needs. But I soon came to realise that it was not possible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her hunger could seem insatiable; my nourishment could not come fast enough, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she hated being changed, and cried as if she were falling into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed comforted by the embraces we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were separated from us, that nothing we had to offer could help.

I soon learned that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to persevere, and then to assist her process the intense emotions triggered by the unattainability of my guarding her from all distress. As she enhanced her skill to take in and digest milk, she also had to build an ability to manage her sentiments and her pain when the supply was insufficient, or when she was suffering, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) annoyance, fury, despondency, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to make things go well, but to assist in finding significance to her feelings journey of things not working out ideally.

This was the contrast, for her, between experiencing someone who was attempting to provide her only good feelings, and instead being helped to grow a skill to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the distinction, for me, between desiring to experience excellent about executing ideally as a ideal parent, and instead developing the capacity to endure my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a sufficiently well – and understand my daughter’s letdown and frustration with me. The distinction between my trying to stop her crying, and recognizing when she had to sob.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel not as strongly the wish to hit “undo” and alter our history into one where everything goes well. I find hope in my feeling of a skill growing inside me to recognise that this is impossible, and to understand that, when I’m busy trying to rebook a holiday, what I truly require is to cry.