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I trust your a good summer: my experience was different. On the day we were scheduled to go on holiday, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which caused our travel plans were forced to be cancelled.

From this experience I gained insight valuable, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to acknowledge pain when things take a turn. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more everyday, gently heartbreaking disappointments that – without the ability to actually feel them – will really weigh us down.

When we were expected to be on holiday but could not be, I kept sensing an urge 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 never felt better, just a bit down. And then I would confront the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery involved frequent uncomfortable wound care, and there is a short period for an relaxing trip on the shores of Belgium. So, no holiday. Just discontent and annoyance, suffering and attention.

I know graver situations can happen, it’s only a holiday, what a privileged problem to have – I know because I tested that argument too. But what I required was to be sincere with my feelings. In those moments when I was able to halt battling the disappointment and we addressed it instead, it felt like we were facing it as a team. Instead of feeling depressed and trying to smile, I’ve given myself permission all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and aversion and wrath, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even was feasible to appreciate our moments at home together.

This recalled 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 in some way erase our difficult moments, like pressing a reset button. But that option only looks to the past. Acknowledging the reality that this is unattainable and accepting the pain and fury for things not turning out how we expected, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can promote a transformation: from denial and depression, to progress and potential. 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 deadening of all emotions, a repressing of rage and grief and disappointment and joy and vitality, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and liberty.

I have frequently found myself trapped in this urge to erase events, but my young child is supporting my evolution. As a recent parent, I was at times overwhelmed by the incredible needs of my newborn. Not only the feeding – sometimes for a lengthy period 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 ended the change you were changing. These routine valuable duties among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a reassurance and a significant blessing. Though they’re also, at moments, unceasing and exhausting. What shocked me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the feelings requirements.

I had believed my most key role as a mother was to fulfill my infant's requirements. But I soon realized that it was unfeasible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her hunger could seem insatiable; my supply could not be produced rapidly, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to alter her clothes – but she despised being changed, and wept as if she were falling into a shadowy pit of misery. And while sometimes she seemed consoled by the cuddles we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were lost to us, that no comfort we gave could aid.

I soon learned that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to endure, and then to assist her process the overwhelming feelings provoked by the infeasibility of my guarding her from all unease. As she developed her capacity to consume and process milk, she also had to build an ability to manage her sentiments and her distress when the supply was insufficient, or when she was in pain, or any other challenging and perplexing experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) frustration, rage, despair, hatred, disappointment, hunger. My job was not to make things go well, but to assist in finding significance to her feelings journey of things being less than perfect.

This was the contrast, for her, between experiencing someone who was trying to give her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being assisted in developing a skill to feel every emotion. It was the difference, for me, between wanting to feel great about doing a perfect job as a flawless caregiver, and instead building the ability to tolerate my own shortcomings in order to do a good enough job – and comprehend my daughter’s letdown and frustration with me. The difference between my seeking to prevent her crying, and comprehending when she required to weep.

Now that we have developed beyond this together, I feel not as strongly the urge to hit “undo” and change our narrative into one where things are ideal. I find hope in my sense of a ability developing within to recognise that this is impossible, and to realize that, when I’m focused on striving to rearrange a trip, what I truly require is to weep.