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I trust your a pleasant summer: mine was not. That day we were supposed to be travel for leisure, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have urgent but routine surgery, which meant our travel plans needed to be cancelled.

From this episode I realized a truth significant, all over again, about how hard it is for me to feel bad when things don't work out. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more everyday, subtly crushing disappointments that – without the ability to actually experience them – will truly burden us.

When we were expected to be on holiday but could not be, I kept feeling a tug 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 didn't improve, just a bit depressed. And then I would bump up against the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery necessitated frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a short period for an relaxing trip on the shores of Belgium. So, no vacation. Just letdown and irritation, 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 instances 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 experiencing sadness and trying to put on a brave face, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and hatred and rage, which at least felt real. At times, it even was feasible to enjoy our time at home together.

This recalled of a wish I sometimes notice in my counseling individuals, and that I have also experienced in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could somehow reverse our unwanted experiences, like pressing a reset button. But that option only goes in reverse. Facing the reality that this is impossible and accepting the pain and fury for things not working out how we expected, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can facilitate a change of current: from denial and depression, to development and opportunity. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be profoundly impactful.

We think of depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a repressing of anger and sadness and letdown and happiness and life force, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but acknowledging every sentiment, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and release.

I have repeatedly found myself caught in this desire to erase events, but my young child is helping me to grow out of it. As a new mother, I was at times burdened by the amazing requirements of my newborn. Not only the nourishing – sometimes for over an hour 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 finished the task you were changing. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a comfort and a tremendous privilege. Though they’re also, at moments, unceasing and exhausting. What shocked me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the emotional demands.

I had assumed my most key role as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon came to realise that it was unfeasible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her craving could seem insatiable; my supply could not arrive quickly, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she despised being changed, and sobbed as if she were falling into a gloomy abyss of despair. And while sometimes she seemed comforted by the embraces we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were distant from us, that no comfort we gave could help.

I soon discovered that my most crucial role as a mother was first to persevere, and then to support her in managing the powerful sentiments caused by the impossibility of my guarding her from all unease. As she grew her ability to take in and digest milk, she also had to develop a capacity to digest her emotions and her distress when the supply was insufficient, or when she was suffering, or any other challenging and perplexing experience – and I had to evolve with her (and my) irritation, anger, hopelessness, loathing, discontent, need. My job was not to guarantee smooth experiences, but to support in creating understanding to her emotional experience of things being less than perfect.

This was the distinction, for her, between having someone who was attempting to provide her only good feelings, and instead being supported in building a skill to experience all feelings. It was the contrast, for me, between aiming to have great about executing ideally as a perfect mother, and instead developing the capacity to accept my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a sufficiently well – and grasp my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The difference between my seeking to prevent her crying, and recognizing when she required to weep.

Now that we have developed beyond this together, I feel less keenly the desire to hit “undo” and alter our history into one where all is perfect. I find hope in my sense of a skill growing inside me to recognise that this is not possible, and to understand that, when I’m focused on striving to rebook a holiday, what I really need is to sob.