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I trust your a good summer: my experience was different. On the day we were scheduled to take a vacation, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, expecting him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which meant our travel plans were forced to be cancelled.

From this experience I gained insight important, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to acknowledge pain when things go wrong. I’m not talking about major catastrophes, but the more everyday, subtly crushing disappointments that – unless we can actually feel them – will significantly depress us.

When we were expected to be on holiday but weren't, I kept feeling a tug 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 never felt better, just a bit down. And then I would face the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery necessitated frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a limited time window for an enjoyable break on the Belgium's beaches. So, no getaway. Just disappointment and frustration, pain and care.

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 wanted was to be honest with myself. In those moments when I was able to cease resisting the disappointment and we discussed it instead, it felt like we were sharing an experience. Instead of being down and trying to appear happy, I’ve granted myself all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to anger and frustration and loathing and fury, which at least felt real. At times, it even became possible to enjoy our time at home together.

This brought to mind of a hope I sometimes see in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could in some way reverse our unwanted experiences, like pressing a reset button. But that button only goes in reverse. Confronting the reality that this is not possible and embracing the pain and fury for things not happening how we anticipated, rather than a false optimism, can facilitate a change of current: from avoidance and sadness, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it needs duration – 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 frustration and sorrow and letdown and happiness and life force, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and release.

I have often found myself trapped in this desire to reverse things, but my toddler is supporting my evolution. As a first-time mom, I was at times swamped 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 outfit alterations, and then the doing it once more before you’ve even finished the swap you were doing. These routine valuable duties among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a solace and a significant blessing. Though they’re also, at moments, unceasing and exhausting. What surprised me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the emotional demands.

I had assumed my most important job 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 demanded it. Her craving could seem insatiable; my supply could not come fast enough, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she disliked being changed, and sobbed as if she were plunging into a shadowy pit of misery. And while sometimes she seemed comforted by the cuddles we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were distant from us, that no comfort we gave could help.

I soon realized that my most important job as a mother was first to endure, and then to help her digest the overwhelming feelings caused by the unattainability of my guarding her from all discomfort. As she grew her ability to take in and digest milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to manage her sentiments and her suffering when the supply was insufficient, or when she was suffering, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to develop alongside her (and my) frustration, rage, despair, loathing, discontent, need. My job was not to ensure everything was perfect, but to support in creating understanding to her sentimental path of things being less than perfect.

This was the distinction, for her, between experiencing someone who was trying to give her only good feelings, and instead being supported in building a skill to experience all feelings. It was the distinction, for me, between wanting to feel wonderful about doing a perfect job as a perfect mother, and instead developing the capacity to tolerate my own imperfections in order to do a adequately performed – and understand my daughter’s letdown and frustration with me. The difference between my seeking to prevent her crying, and recognizing when she had to sob.

Now that we have developed beyond this together, I feel reduced the desire to hit “undo” and change our narrative into one where all is perfect. I find hope in my sense of a capacity developing within to acknowledge that this is not possible, and to realize that, when I’m occupied with attempting to rebook a holiday, what I truly require is to cry.