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I trust your a pleasant summer: mine was not. The very 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 caused our vacation arrangements were forced to be cancelled.

From this situation I gained insight significant, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to feel bad when things don't work out. I’m not talking about major catastrophes, but the more everyday, quietly devastating disappointments that – if we don't 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 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 remained low, just a bit down. And then I would bump up against the reality that this holiday had truly vanished: my husband’s surgery required frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a finite opportunity for an pleasant vacation on the Belgian coast. So, no vacation. Just letdown and irritation, suffering and attention.

I know worse things can happen, it's just a trip, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I used that reasoning too. But what I needed was to be truthful to 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 feeling depressed and trying to appear happy, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and aversion and wrath, which at least felt real. At times, it even turned out to appreciate our moments at home together.

This reminded me of a hope I sometimes see in my counseling individuals, and that I have also seen in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could perhaps reverse our unwanted experiences, like hitting a reverse switch. But that option only goes in reverse. Confronting the reality that this is impossible and allowing the pain and fury for things not working out how we expected, rather than a false optimism, can facilitate a change of current: from avoidance and sadness, to development and opportunity. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be profoundly impactful.

We view depression as experiencing negativity – 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 vitality, and all the rest. The substitute for depression is not happiness, but acknowledging every sentiment, a kind of honest emotional expression and release.

I have repeatedly found myself trapped in this urge to reverse things, but my little one is assisting me in moving past it. As a new mother, I was at times swamped by the amazing requirements of my baby. Not only the feeding – 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 changing again before you’ve even finished the swap you were handling. These routine valuable duties among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a reassurance and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, persistent and tiring. What astounded me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the emotional demands.

I had believed my most important job as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon understood that it was unfeasible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her appetite 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 falling 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 distant from us, that no solution we provided could aid.

I soon learned that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to endure, and then to assist her process the powerful sentiments caused by the impossibility of my guarding her from all discomfort. As she grew her ability 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 suffering, or any other hard and bewildering 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 being less than perfect.

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 ability to feel every emotion. It was the distinction, for me, between aiming to have great about performing flawlessly as a flawless caregiver, and instead building the ability to endure my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a adequately performed – and understand my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The distinction between my attempting to halt her crying, and comprehending when she needed to cry.

Now that we have developed beyond this together, I feel less keenly the desire to press reverse and alter our history into one where everything goes well. I find faith in my feeling of a ability growing inside me to understand that this is impossible, and to comprehend that, when I’m occupied with attempting to rebook a holiday, what I truly require is to cry.