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I hope you had a good summer: my experience was different. That day we were planning to travel for leisure, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which meant our vacation arrangements were forced to be cancelled.

From this episode I gained insight valuable, all over again, about how hard it is for me to experience sadness when things take a turn. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more routine, quietly devastating disappointments that – unless we can actually experience them – will truly burden us.

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 didn't improve, just a bit down. And then I would bump up against the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery required frequent uncomfortable wound care, and there is a finite opportunity for an relaxing trip on the shores of Belgium. So, no holiday. 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 tried that line too. But what I needed was to be sincere with my feelings. In those times when I was able to cease resisting the disappointment and we addressed it instead, it felt like we were facing it as a team. Instead of being down and trying to appear happy, I’ve given myself permission 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 value our days at home together.

This brought to mind of a wish I sometimes notice in my therapy clients, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could somehow reverse our unwanted experiences, like clicking “undo”. But that option only looks to the past. Facing the reality that this is impossible and allowing the pain and fury for things not working out how we expected, rather than a insincere positive spin, can enable a shift: from rejection and low mood, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be life-changing.

We view depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of dulling of all emotions, a pressing down of anger and sadness and letdown and happiness and life force, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and freedom.

I have repeatedly found myself stuck in this wish to erase events, but my young child is supporting my evolution. As a first-time mom, I was at times swamped by the incredible needs of my infant. Not only the nourishing – 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 doing it once more before you’ve even ended the swap you were doing. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a solace and a significant blessing. Though they’re also, at moments, persistent and tiring. What astounded me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the psychological needs.

I had thought my most key role as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. But I soon understood that it was not possible to meet all of my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her craving could seem insatiable; my nourishment could not be produced rapidly, or it came too fast. And then we needed to alter her clothes – but she hated being changed, and wept as if she were descending into a shadowy pit of misery. And while sometimes she seemed comforted by the embraces we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were lost to us, that nothing we had to offer could help.

I soon realized that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to survive, and then to support her in managing the powerful sentiments triggered by the infeasibility of my guarding her from all discomfort. As she grew her ability to ingest and absorb milk, she also had to develop a capacity to process her feelings and her pain when the nourishment was delayed, or when she was suffering, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) annoyance, fury, despondency, loathing, discontent, need. My job was not to guarantee smooth experiences, but to help bring meaning to her feelings journey of things not working out ideally.

This was the difference, for her, between experiencing someone who was attempting to provide her only good feelings, and instead being supported in building a skill to feel every emotion. It was the contrast, for me, between desiring to experience excellent about performing flawlessly as a ideal parent, and instead developing the capacity to tolerate my own imperfections 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 had to sob.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel not as strongly the desire to press reverse and alter our history into one where everything goes well. I find optimism in my feeling of a ability developing within to recognise that this is unattainable, and to comprehend that, when I’m focused on striving to rearrange a trip, what I truly require is to weep.