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I hope you had a pleasant summer: mine was not. On the day we were planning to travel for leisure, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have prompt but common surgery, which meant our getaway ideas had to be cancelled.

From this experience I learned something significant, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to acknowledge pain when things take a turn. I’m not talking about major catastrophes, but the more common, gently heartbreaking disappointments that – without the ability to actually feel them – will significantly depress us.

When we were expected to be on holiday but could not be, 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 face 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 relaxing trip on the shores of Belgium. So, no holiday. Just letdown and irritation, suffering and attention.

I know more serious issues can happen, it's just a trip, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I used that reasoning too. But what I required was to be truthful to myself. In those times when I was able to stop fighting off the disappointment and we talked about it instead, it felt like we were going through something together. Instead of feeling depressed and trying to appear happy, I’ve granted myself all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and loathing and fury, which at least seemed authentic. At times, it even became possible to value our days at home together.

This reminded me of a hope I sometimes notice in my counseling individuals, and that I have also seen in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could in some way reverse our unwanted experiences, like pressing a reset button. But that arrow only points backwards. Confronting the reality that this is impossible and embracing the grief and rage for things not working out how we hoped, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can promote a transformation: from avoidance and sadness, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it needs duration – this can be transformative.

We consider depression as experiencing negativity – but to my mind it’s a kind of dulling of all emotions, a repressing of anger and sadness and disappointment and joy and life force, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of honest emotional expression and release.

I have frequently found myself trapped in this wish to reverse things, but my toddler is assisting me in moving past it. As a first-time mom, I was at times overwhelmed by the astonishing demands of my baby. Not only the feeding – sometimes for over an hour at a time, and then again under 60 minutes after that – and not only the diaper swaps, and then the changing again before you’ve even completed the change you were doing. These everyday important activities among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a comfort and a significant blessing. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What shocked me the most – aside from the sleep deprivation – were the psychological needs.

I had assumed my most primary duty as a mother was to fulfill my infant's requirements. But I soon understood that it was not possible to meet all of my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her appetite could seem unmeetable; my nourishment could not be produced rapidly, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to change her – but she hated being changed, and sobbed as if she were descending 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 solution we provided could help.

I soon learned that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to endure, and then to help her digest the intense emotions provoked by the impossibility of my guarding her from all distress. As she enhanced her skill to consume and process milk, she also had to develop a capacity to manage her sentiments and her suffering 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, hatred, disappointment, hunger. My job was not to make things go well, but to assist in finding significance to her emotional experience of things not working out ideally.

This was the difference, for her, between being with someone who was trying to give her only good feelings, and instead being helped to grow a skill to experience all feelings. It was the contrast, for me, between desiring to experience excellent about doing a perfect job as a flawless caregiver, and instead developing the capacity to accept my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a good enough job – and understand my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The distinction between my trying to stop her crying, and comprehending when she required to weep.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel less keenly the wish to hit “undo” and alter our history into one where everything goes well. I find faith in my sense of a capacity growing inside me to understand that this is unattainable, and to realize that, when I’m occupied with attempting to reschedule a vacation, what I truly require is to cry.