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I trust your a enjoyable summer: I did not. That day we were supposed to be go on holiday, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have urgent but routine surgery, which meant our getaway ideas were forced to be cancelled.

From this episode I gained insight valuable, all over again, about how hard it is for me to feel bad when things take a turn. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more everyday, quietly devastating disappointments that – if we don't actually feel them – will significantly depress us.

When we were meant to be on holiday but were not, 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 never felt better, just a bit blue. And then I would face the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery involved frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a short period for an pleasant vacation on the shores of Belgium. So, no vacation. Just discontent and annoyance, pain and care.

I know graver situations 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 sincere with my feelings. In those moments when I was able to halt battling the disappointment and we discussed it instead, it felt like we were sharing an experience. Instead of being down and trying to smile, I’ve granted myself all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to anger and frustration and loathing and fury, which at least felt real. At times, it even was feasible to appreciate our moments at home together.

This recalled of a wish I sometimes see in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could somehow undo our negative events, like clicking “undo”. But that option only points backwards. Acknowledging the reality that this is not possible and embracing the pain and fury for things not turning out how we hoped, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can facilitate a change of current: from rejection and low mood, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be profoundly impactful.

We consider depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a suppressing of rage and grief and letdown and happiness and life force, and all the rest. The substitute for depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and liberty.

I have repeatedly found myself stuck in this wish to click “undo”, but my little one is helping me to grow out of it. As a new mother, I was at times burdened by the incredible needs of my newborn. 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 handling. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a reassurance and a tremendous privilege. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What surprised me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the psychological needs.

I had thought my most important job as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon understood that it was impossible to meet all of my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her appetite could seem endless; my nourishment could not arrive quickly, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to change her – but she hated being changed, and wept as if she were plunging into a dark vortex of doom. 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 nothing we had to offer could aid.

I soon realized that my most important job as a mother was first to endure, and then to assist her process the overwhelming feelings provoked by the impossibility of my shielding her from all distress. As she enhanced her skill to consume and process milk, she also had to build an ability to manage her sentiments and her suffering when the supply was insufficient, or when she was in pain, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to evolve with her (and my) annoyance, fury, despondency, loathing, discontent, need. My job was not to guarantee smooth experiences, but to support in creating understanding to her emotional experience of things being less than perfect.

This was the distinction, for her, between having someone who was trying to give her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being assisted in developing a skill to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the difference, for me, between wanting to feel wonderful about doing a perfect job as a perfect mother, and instead cultivating the skill to endure my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a sufficiently well – and grasp my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The contrast between my trying to stop her crying, and understanding when she required to weep.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel reduced the wish to press reverse and rewrite our story into one where things are ideal. I find faith in my awareness of a skill evolving internally to acknowledge that this is impossible, and to comprehend that, when I’m busy trying to reschedule a vacation, what I actually want is to weep.