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I trust your a good summer: mine was not. The very day we were planning to take a vacation, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have urgent but routine surgery, which resulted in our travel plans had to be cancelled.

From this episode I gained insight significant, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to feel bad when things go wrong. I’m not talking about major catastrophes, but the more routine, quietly devastating disappointments that – unless we can actually feel them – will truly burden us.

When we were expected to be on holiday but were not, 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 depressed. And then I would confront the reality that this holiday had truly vanished: my husband’s surgery involved frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a finite opportunity for an enjoyable break on the Belgian coast. So, no getaway. Just discontent and annoyance, suffering and attention.

I know graver situations can happen, it’s only a holiday, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I tried that line too. But what I needed was to be sincere with my feelings. In those times when I was able to halt battling the disappointment and we discussed 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 granted myself all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and hatred and rage, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even turned out to enjoy our time at home together.

This recalled of a desire I sometimes notice in my counseling individuals, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could perhaps erase our difficult moments, like hitting a reverse switch. But that arrow only goes in reverse. Facing the reality that this is impossible and embracing the sorrow and anger for things not turning out how we hoped, rather than a insincere positive spin, can enable a shift: from rejection and low mood, to development and opportunity. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be profoundly impactful.

We think of depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of dulling of all emotions, a suppressing of rage and grief and frustration and delight and life force, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and freedom.

I have repeatedly found myself caught in this urge to erase events, but my young child is supporting my evolution. As a new mother, I was at times swamped by the incredible needs of my baby. Not only the nursing – sometimes for a lengthy period at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the outfit alterations, and then the repeating the process before you’ve even completed the swap you were handling. These everyday important activities among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a reassurance and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, persistent and tiring. What shocked me the most – aside from the sleep deprivation – were the feelings requirements.

I had assumed my most key role as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. But I soon came to realise that it was unfeasible to meet all of my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her hunger could seem endless; my nourishment could not come fast enough, or it came too fast. And then we needed to alter her clothes – but she despised being changed, and sobbed as if she were descending 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 lost to 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 assist her process the intense emotions caused by the infeasibility of my shielding her from all distress. As she developed her capacity to consume and process milk, she also had to build an ability to manage her sentiments and her pain when the supply was insufficient, or when she was in pain, or any other hard and bewildering experience – and I had to evolve with her (and my) irritation, anger, hopelessness, hatred, disappointment, hunger. My job was not to guarantee smooth experiences, but to support in creating understanding to her feelings journey of things being less than perfect.

This was the contrast, for her, between being with someone who was trying to give her only good feelings, and instead being assisted in developing a ability to experience all feelings. It was the distinction, for me, between desiring to experience great about doing a perfect job as a perfect mother, and instead building the ability to tolerate my own shortcomings in order to do a adequately performed – and grasp my daughter’s letdown and frustration with me. The distinction between my attempting to halt her crying, and understanding when she needed to cry.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel not as strongly the urge to hit “undo” and rewrite our story into one where things are ideal. I find optimism in my sense of a skill developing within to recognise that this is unattainable, and to comprehend that, when I’m occupied with attempting to rearrange a trip, what I truly require is to weep.