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I trust your a good summer: my experience was different. On the day we were planning to take a vacation, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have urgent but routine surgery, which caused our travel plans were forced to be cancelled.

From this situation I learned something important, all over again, about how hard it is for me to feel bad when things take a turn. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more routine, subtly crushing disappointments that – if we don't actually feel them – will really weigh us down.

When we were meant 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 face the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery necessitated frequent uncomfortable wound care, and there is a finite opportunity for an pleasant vacation on the Belgian coast. So, no getaway. Just discontent and annoyance, suffering and attention.

I know more serious issues can happen, it's merely a vacation, such a fortunate concern to have – I know because I used that reasoning too. But what I needed was to be truthful to myself. In those times when I was able to stop fighting off 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 difficult sentiments, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and loathing and fury, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even turned out to enjoy our time at home together.

This brought to mind of a hope I sometimes observe in my therapy clients, and that I have also seen in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could perhaps reverse our unwanted experiences, like pressing a reset button. But that option only points backwards. Facing the reality that this is not possible and allowing the sorrow and anger 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 transformative.

We view depression as experiencing negativity – but to my mind it’s a kind of dulling of all emotions, a repressing of frustration and sorrow and disappointment and joy and energy, and all the rest. The substitute for depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and freedom.

I have repeatedly found myself caught in this desire to click “undo”, but my little one is helping me to grow out of it. As a first-time mom, I was at times burdened by the incredible needs of my baby. Not only the nursing – sometimes for over an hour at a time, and then again under 60 minutes after that – and not only the diaper swaps, and then the doing it once more before you’ve even ended the swap you were handling. These everyday important activities among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a comfort and a tremendous privilege. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What shocked me the most – aside from the sleep deprivation – were the psychological needs.

I had believed my most key role as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon realized that it was impossible to meet all of my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her craving could seem insatiable; my nourishment could not arrive quickly, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she hated being changed, and cried 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 distant from us, that no solution we provided could assist.

I soon discovered that my most important job as a mother was first to endure, and then to help her digest the intense emotions provoked by the impossibility of my guarding her from all discomfort. As she grew her ability to consume and process milk, she also had to build an ability to digest her emotions and her pain when the milk didn’t come, or when she was hurting, or any other challenging and perplexing experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) irritation, anger, hopelessness, loathing, discontent, need. My job was not to ensure everything was perfect, but to help bring meaning to her sentimental path of things not working out ideally.

This was the contrast, for her, between experiencing someone who was seeking to offer her only good feelings, and instead being supported in building a capacity to experience all feelings. It was the difference, for me, between aiming to have great about executing ideally as a ideal parent, and instead developing the capacity to tolerate my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a good enough job – and comprehend my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The distinction between my trying to stop her crying, and understanding when she required to weep.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel not as strongly the wish to hit “undo” and rewrite our story into one where things are ideal. I find optimism in my awareness of a skill developing within to recognise that this is unattainable, and to realize that, when I’m busy trying to rearrange a trip, what I actually want is to weep.