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I wish you enjoyed a enjoyable summer: my experience was different. The very day we were supposed to be take a vacation, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, expecting him to have urgent but routine surgery, which caused our getaway ideas needed to be cancelled.

From this episode I learned something valuable, all over again, about how hard it is for me to acknowledge pain when things take a turn. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more routine, subtly crushing disappointments that – unless we can actually experience them – will really weigh us down.

When we were expected 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 remained low, just a bit depressed. And then I would confront the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery necessitated frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a limited time window for an relaxing trip on the Belgian coast. So, no vacation. Just disappointment and frustration, suffering and attention.

I know graver situations can happen, it’s only a holiday, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I used that reasoning too. But what I needed 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 experiencing sadness and trying to put on a brave face, I’ve granted myself all sorts of unpleasant emotions, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and hatred and rage, which at least seemed authentic. At times, it even was feasible to enjoy our time at home together.

This brought to mind of a wish I sometimes see in my counseling individuals, and that I have also experienced in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could in some way erase our difficult moments, like clicking “undo”. But that button only points backwards. Facing the reality that this is unattainable and allowing the pain and fury for things not happening how we expected, rather than a false optimism, can enable a shift: from avoidance and sadness, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it needs duration – this can be life-changing.

We view depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of deadening of all emotions, a suppressing of anger and sadness and frustration and delight and vitality, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of honest emotional expression and freedom.

I have frequently found myself stuck in this desire to click “undo”, but my little one is assisting me in moving past it. As a first-time mom, 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 changing, and then the repeating the process before you’ve even ended the swap you were doing. These everyday important activities among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a solace and a significant blessing. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What astounded me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the feelings requirements.

I had assumed my most important job as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. But I soon understood that it was not possible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her appetite could seem unmeetable; my supply could not be produced rapidly, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to alter her clothes – but she despised being changed, and cried 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 distant from us, that nothing we had to offer could aid.

I soon learned that my most important job as a mother was first to persevere, and then to help her digest the overwhelming feelings triggered by the unattainability of my shielding her from all unease. As she enhanced her skill to consume and process milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to manage her sentiments and her pain when the nourishment was delayed, or when she was hurting, or any other challenging and perplexing experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) frustration, rage, despair, loathing, discontent, need. My job was not to guarantee smooth experiences, but to assist in finding significance to her feelings journey of things not working out ideally.

This was the contrast, for her, between experiencing someone who was seeking to offer her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being supported in building a capacity to experience all feelings. It was the difference, for me, between desiring to experience wonderful about executing ideally as a perfect mother, and instead cultivating the skill to tolerate my own imperfections in order to do a adequately performed – and grasp my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The difference between my attempting to halt her crying, and recognizing when she had to sob.

Now that we have developed beyond this together, I feel not as strongly the wish to press reverse and rewrite our story into one where things are ideal. I find hope in my awareness of a skill growing inside me to acknowledge that this is not possible, and to realize that, when I’m occupied with attempting to rebook a holiday, what I really need is to cry.