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I trust your a good summer: I did not. That day we were scheduled to travel for leisure, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which meant our travel plans needed to be cancelled.

From this episode I gained insight important, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to acknowledge pain when things don't work out. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more routine, quietly devastating disappointments that – unless we can actually experience them – will really weigh us down.

When we were meant to be on holiday but weren't, I kept sensing an urge 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 bump up against the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery involved frequent uncomfortable wound care, and there is a finite opportunity for an enjoyable break on the Belgian coast. So, no getaway. Just disappointment and frustration, suffering and attention.

I know more serious issues can happen, it's just a trip, such a fortunate concern to have – I know because I used that reasoning too. But what I needed was to be honest with myself. In those times when I was able to cease resisting the disappointment and we addressed it instead, it felt like we were going through something together. Instead of feeling depressed and trying to smile, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and aversion and wrath, which at least seemed authentic. At times, it even became possible to appreciate our moments at home together.

This recalled of a hope I sometimes notice in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could perhaps erase our difficult moments, like clicking “undo”. But that button only goes in reverse. Acknowledging the reality that this is not possible and embracing the grief and rage for things not working out how we anticipated, rather than a false optimism, can facilitate a change of current: from rejection and low mood, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it needs duration – this can be profoundly impactful.

We view depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a repressing of rage and grief and disappointment and joy and life force, and all the rest. The substitute for depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and freedom.

I have often found myself caught in this wish to click “undo”, but my little one is helping me to grow out of it. As a first-time mom, I was at times overwhelmed by the incredible needs of my infant. Not only the nursing – sometimes for more than 60 minutes at a time, and then again less than an hour after that – and not only the changing, and then the changing again before you’ve even ended the swap you were changing. These routine valuable duties among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a comfort and a tremendous privilege. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What surprised me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the feelings requirements.

I had believed my most important job as a mother was to fulfill my infant's requirements. But I soon came to realise that it was impossible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her appetite could seem endless; my milk could not be produced rapidly, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to change her – but she despised being changed, and sobbed as if she were plunging into a gloomy abyss of despair. And while sometimes she seemed soothed by the hugs we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were lost to us, that no solution we provided could aid.

I soon discovered that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to persevere, and then to support her in managing the overwhelming feelings caused by the impossibility of my protecting 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 suffering when the milk didn’t come, or when she was suffering, or any other hard and bewildering 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 assist in finding significance to her sentimental path of things not going so well.

This was the distinction, for her, between having someone who was seeking to offer her only good feelings, and instead being assisted in developing a capacity to experience all feelings. It was the difference, for me, between desiring to experience great about doing a perfect job as a flawless caregiver, and instead building the ability to accept my own imperfections in order to do a sufficiently well – and comprehend my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The distinction between my attempting to halt her crying, and recognizing when she had to sob.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel less keenly the wish to click erase and rewrite our story into one where things are ideal. I find hope in my feeling of a ability evolving internally to understand that this is impossible, and to realize that, when I’m focused on striving to rearrange a trip, what I truly require is to sob.