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I wish you enjoyed a pleasant summer: I did not. That day we were scheduled to travel for leisure, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, expecting him to have prompt but common surgery, which resulted in our vacation arrangements needed to be cancelled.

From this situation I gained insight valuable, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to acknowledge pain when things don't work out. I’m not talking about major catastrophes, but the more everyday, gently heartbreaking disappointments that – if we don't actually acknowledge them – will truly burden us.

When we were expected to be on holiday but could not be, I kept experiencing a pull 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 didn't improve, just a bit blue. And then I would bump up against the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery necessitated frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a limited time window for an pleasant vacation on the Belgian coast. So, no holiday. Just discontent and annoyance, pain and care.

I know more serious issues can happen, it’s only a holiday, 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 instances when I was able to cease resisting 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 given myself permission all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to anger and frustration and hatred and rage, which at least seemed authentic. At times, it even turned out to enjoy our time at home together.

This recalled of a hope I sometimes notice in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also seen in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could in some way reverse our unwanted experiences, like hitting a reverse switch. But that arrow only goes in reverse. Acknowledging the reality that this is unattainable and embracing the pain and fury for things not working out how we anticipated, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can promote a transformation: from avoidance and sadness, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it needs duration – this can be transformative.

We think of depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of deadening of all emotions, a repressing of anger and sadness and letdown and happiness and life force, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and liberty.

I have repeatedly found myself stuck in this urge to click “undo”, but my little one is assisting me in moving past it. As a recent parent, I was at times swamped by the amazing requirements of my baby. Not only the nursing – sometimes for over an hour at a time, and then again under 60 minutes after that – and not only the outfit alterations, and then the doing it once more before you’ve even completed the change you were doing. These routine valuable duties among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a reassurance and a significant blessing. Though they’re also, at moments, unceasing and exhausting. What shocked me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the feelings requirements.

I had thought my most important job as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon understood that it was not possible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her craving could seem unmeetable; my milk could not arrive quickly, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to alter her clothes – but she despised being changed, and wept as if she were falling into a gloomy abyss of despair. And while sometimes she seemed soothed 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 aid.

I soon realized that my most crucial role as a mother was first to persevere, and then to support her in managing the overwhelming feelings triggered by the unattainability of my shielding her from all unease. As she grew her ability to take in and digest milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to digest her emotions and her pain when the nourishment was delayed, or when she was suffering, or any other hard and bewildering experience – and I had to develop alongside her (and my) irritation, anger, hopelessness, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to make things go well, but to help bring meaning to her feelings journey of things not going so well.

This was the contrast, for her, between having someone who was seeking to offer her only good feelings, and instead being helped to grow a skill to feel every emotion. It was the distinction, for me, between wanting to feel excellent about doing a perfect job as a flawless caregiver, and instead developing the capacity to accept my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a sufficiently well – and grasp my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The distinction between my trying to stop her crying, and comprehending when she needed to cry.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel not as strongly the wish to press reverse and alter our history into one where everything goes well. I find faith in my sense of a skill evolving internally to understand that this is not possible, and to realize that, when I’m occupied with attempting to reschedule a vacation, what I truly require is to sob.