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I wish you enjoyed a pleasant summer: my experience was different. The very day we were supposed to be take a vacation, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which meant our getaway ideas needed to be cancelled.

From this situation I learned something significant, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to acknowledge pain when things go wrong. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more everyday, subtly crushing disappointments that – without the ability to actually feel them – will significantly depress us.

When we were meant to be on holiday but could not be, 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 didn't improve, just a bit depressed. 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 pleasant vacation on the shores of Belgium. So, no holiday. Just discontent and annoyance, suffering and attention.

I know graver situations can happen, it's merely a vacation, what a privileged problem to have – I know because I used that reasoning too. But what I wanted was to be sincere with my feelings. In those times when I was able to stop fighting off the disappointment and we addressed it instead, it felt like we were going through something together. Instead of feeling depressed and trying to put on a brave face, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of unpleasant emotions, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and loathing and fury, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even was feasible to enjoy our time at home together.

This brought to mind of a desire I sometimes notice in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could somehow undo our negative events, like hitting a reverse switch. But that option only points backwards. Confronting the reality that this is not possible and accepting the grief and rage for things not happening how we anticipated, rather than a insincere positive spin, can promote a transformation: from denial and depression, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be profoundly impactful.

We view depression as experiencing negativity – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a suppressing of frustration and sorrow and disappointment and joy and life force, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of honest emotional expression and freedom.

I have frequently found myself trapped in this urge to click “undo”, but my young child is assisting me in moving past it. As a new mother, I was at times overwhelmed by the amazing requirements of my baby. Not only the feeding – sometimes for more than 60 minutes at a time, and then again less than an hour after that – and not only the diaper swaps, and then the doing it once more before you’ve even finished the task you were doing. These routine valuable duties among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a solace and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, persistent and tiring. What shocked me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the psychological needs.

I had assumed my most key role as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon realized that it was not possible to meet all of my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her appetite could seem insatiable; my nourishment could not be produced rapidly, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she despised being changed, and sobbed as if she were descending into a gloomy abyss of despair. And while sometimes she seemed consoled by the embraces we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were lost to us, that no solution we provided could help.

I soon discovered that my most important job as a mother was first to endure, and then to help her digest the overwhelming feelings triggered by the unattainability of my guarding her from all unease. As she developed her capacity to consume and process milk, she also had to develop a capacity to digest her emotions and her distress when the milk didn’t come, or when she was suffering, or any other challenging and perplexing experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) irritation, anger, hopelessness, hatred, disappointment, hunger. My job was not to make things go well, but to help bring meaning to her emotional experience of things not working out ideally.

This was the difference, for her, between being with someone who was seeking to offer her only good feelings, and instead being helped to grow a skill to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the contrast, for me, between aiming to have great about doing a perfect job as a ideal parent, and instead cultivating the skill to endure my own imperfections in order to do a sufficiently well – and understand my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The contrast between my seeking to prevent her crying, and comprehending when she had to sob.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel reduced the desire to press reverse and alter our history into one where all is perfect. I find optimism in my awareness of a ability developing within to understand that this is not possible, and to understand that, when I’m occupied with attempting to reschedule a vacation, what I really need is to cry.