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I wish you enjoyed a enjoyable 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 resulted in our travel plans were forced to be cancelled.

From this episode I gained insight valuable, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to experience sadness when things go wrong. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more routine, subtly crushing disappointments that – unless we can actually acknowledge them – will truly burden us.

When we were supposed to be on holiday but could not be, I kept sensing an urge towards seeking optimism: “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 face the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery required frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a finite opportunity for an pleasant vacation on the Belgian coast. So, no holiday. Just letdown and irritation, hurt and nurturing.

I know graver situations can happen, it's merely a vacation, such a fortunate concern to have – I know because I tested that argument too. But what I needed was to be sincere with my feelings. In those instances when I was able to halt battling the disappointment and we talked about it instead, it felt like we were going through something together. Instead of feeling depressed and trying to put on a brave face, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to anger and frustration and hatred and rage, which at least felt real. At times, it even was feasible to enjoy our time at home together.

This brought to mind of a wish I sometimes see in my counseling individuals, and that I have also seen in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could in some way erase our difficult moments, like pressing a reset button. But that option only looks to the past. Facing the reality that this is not possible and embracing the pain and fury for things not working out how we expected, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can facilitate a change of current: from denial and depression, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it needs duration – this can be life-changing.

We think of depression as experiencing negativity – but to my mind it’s a kind of deadening of all emotions, a pressing down of anger and sadness and frustration and delight and vitality, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but acknowledging every sentiment, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and release.

I have repeatedly found myself caught in this desire to reverse things, but my young child is helping me to grow out of it. As a first-time mom, I was at times swamped by the amazing requirements of my newborn. 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 ended the change you were doing. These routine valuable duties among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a solace and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, unceasing and exhausting. What surprised me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the feelings requirements.

I had believed my most important job as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. But I soon understood that it was impossible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her craving could seem insatiable; my supply could not come fast enough, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to alter her clothes – but she hated being changed, and cried as if she were plunging into a shadowy pit of misery. And while sometimes she seemed comforted by the hugs we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were distant from us, that no solution we provided could aid.

I soon discovered that my most crucial role as a mother was first to survive, and then to support her in managing the powerful sentiments provoked by the unattainability of my protecting her from all discomfort. As she developed her capacity to consume and process milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to process her feelings and her distress when the supply was insufficient, or when she was suffering, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to evolve with 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 going so well.

This was the distinction, for her, between having someone who was attempting to provide her only positive emotions, and instead being helped to grow a capacity to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the difference, for me, between wanting to feel great about performing flawlessly as a flawless caregiver, and instead cultivating the skill to endure my own imperfections in order to do a adequately performed – and understand my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The contrast between my attempting to halt her crying, and recognizing when she needed to cry.

Now that we have developed beyond this together, I feel reduced the urge to hit “undo” and rewrite our story into one where things are ideal. I find hope in my sense of a capacity developing within to recognise that this is unattainable, and to comprehend that, when I’m focused on striving to rebook a holiday, what I truly require is to weep.