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I wish you enjoyed a pleasant summer: my experience was different. On the day we were planning to travel for leisure, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have prompt but common surgery, which meant our travel plans had to be cancelled.

From this episode I gained insight valuable, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to acknowledge pain when things take a turn. I’m not talking about major catastrophes, but the more routine, quietly devastating disappointments that – unless we can actually feel them – will really weigh us down.

When we were expected to be on holiday but were not, I kept experiencing a pull 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 remained low, just a bit down. 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 relaxing trip on the Belgian coast. So, no vacation. Just letdown and irritation, suffering and attention.

I know worse things can happen, it's merely a vacation, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I used that reasoning 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 addressed it instead, it felt like we were sharing an experience. Instead of feeling depressed and trying to smile, I’ve granted 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 turned out to appreciate our moments at home together.

This reminded me of a desire I sometimes notice in my counseling individuals, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could in some way undo our negative events, like clicking “undo”. But that button only looks to the past. Confronting the reality that this is not possible and accepting the pain and fury for things not happening how we hoped, rather than a insincere positive spin, can enable a shift: from avoidance and sadness, to development and opportunity. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be profoundly impactful.

We consider depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of dulling of all emotions, a repressing of frustration and sorrow and frustration and delight and vitality, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and liberty.

I have frequently found myself caught in this desire to click “undo”, but my toddler is assisting me in moving past it. As a first-time mom, I was at times swamped by the astonishing demands of my newborn. Not only the feeding – sometimes for over an hour at a time, and then again under 60 minutes after that – and not only the changing, and then the changing again before you’ve even finished the change you were changing. These routine valuable duties among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a reassurance and a tremendous privilege. Though they’re also, at moments, unceasing and exhausting. What surprised me the most – aside from the sleep deprivation – were the feelings requirements.

I had believed my most primary duty as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. But I soon realized that it was impossible to meet all of my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her appetite could seem insatiable; my nourishment could not arrive quickly, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she disliked being changed, and wept as if she were descending into a gloomy abyss of despair. And while sometimes she seemed consoled by the cuddles we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were separated from us, that no comfort we gave could assist.

I soon learned that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to endure, and then to assist her process the powerful sentiments caused by the impossibility of my guarding 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 pain when the supply was insufficient, or when she was suffering, or any other hard and bewildering experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) irritation, anger, hopelessness, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to guarantee smooth experiences, but to help bring meaning 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 positive emotions, and instead being supported in building a capacity to feel every emotion. It was the difference, for me, between desiring to experience excellent about performing flawlessly as a flawless caregiver, and instead cultivating the skill to tolerate my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a sufficiently well – and comprehend my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The contrast between my attempting to halt her crying, and recognizing when she required to weep.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel reduced the wish to click erase and change our narrative into one where all is perfect. I find hope in my sense of a capacity developing within to recognise that this is unattainable, and to realize that, when I’m occupied with attempting to rearrange a trip, what I really need is to sob.