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I hope you had a good summer: my experience was different. The very day we were scheduled to go on holiday, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have urgent but routine surgery, which meant our getaway ideas were forced to be cancelled.

From this episode I gained insight valuable, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to experience sadness when things go wrong. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more routine, subtly crushing disappointments that – unless we can actually experience them – will really weigh us down.

When we were meant to be on holiday but weren't, I kept experiencing a pull 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 really was gone: my husband’s surgery involved frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a finite opportunity for an relaxing trip on the Belgium's beaches. So, no vacation. Just discontent and annoyance, suffering and attention.

I know more serious issues can happen, it's merely a vacation, what a privileged problem to have – I know because I used that reasoning too. But what I required was to be honest with myself. In those times when I was able to cease resisting the disappointment and we talked about it instead, it felt like we were facing it as a team. Instead of being down and trying to smile, I’ve granted 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 turned out to value our days at home together.

This recalled of a desire I sometimes observe in my therapy clients, and that I have also witnessed 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. Acknowledging the reality that this is unattainable and embracing the sorrow and anger for things not turning out how we anticipated, rather than a false optimism, can promote a transformation: from avoidance and sadness, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it needs duration – this can be profoundly impactful.

We view depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a pressing down of frustration and sorrow and disappointment and joy and life force, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and release.

I have often found myself caught in this wish to reverse things, but my little one is assisting me in moving past it. As a first-time mom, I was at times overwhelmed by the amazing requirements of my baby. Not only the nursing – sometimes for a lengthy period 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 finished the swap you were doing. These routine valuable duties among so many others – efficiency blended with affection – are a reassurance 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 emotional demands.

I had thought my most primary duty as a mother was to fulfill my infant's requirements. But I soon came to realise that it was not possible to meet all of my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her hunger could seem endless; my nourishment could not be produced rapidly, or it came too fast. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she hated being changed, and wept as if she were descending into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed comforted by the cuddles we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were lost to 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 help her digest the overwhelming feelings provoked by the infeasibility of my shielding her from all unease. As she grew her ability to consume and process milk, she also had to develop a capacity to digest her emotions and her distress when the nourishment was delayed, or when she was suffering, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to evolve with her (and my) irritation, anger, hopelessness, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to make things go well, but to support in creating understanding to her feelings journey of things not going so well.

This was the difference, for her, between being with someone who was trying to give her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being assisted in developing a skill to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the difference, for me, between wanting to feel wonderful about executing ideally as a flawless caregiver, and instead building the ability to tolerate 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 seeking to prevent her crying, and comprehending when she required to weep.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel not as strongly the desire to click erase and alter our history into one where things are ideal. I find hope in my feeling of a capacity evolving internally to recognise that this is not possible, and to realize that, when I’m focused on striving to rebook a holiday, what I actually want is to cry.