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I hope you had a pleasant summer: I did not. That day we were scheduled to travel for leisure, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have urgent but routine surgery, which meant our travel plans had to be cancelled.

From this situation I learned something valuable, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to feel bad when things don't work out. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more common, quietly devastating disappointments that – if we don't actually feel them – will really weigh us down.

When we were expected to be on holiday but weren't, 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 didn't improve, just a bit depressed. And then I would confront the reality that this holiday had truly vanished: my husband’s surgery required frequent uncomfortable wound care, and there is a short period for an relaxing trip on the Belgium's beaches. So, no vacation. Just discontent and annoyance, pain and care.

I know worse things can happen, it’s only a holiday, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I tested that argument too. But what I required 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 smile, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of unpleasant emotions, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and loathing and fury, which at least felt real. At times, it even turned out to enjoy our time at home together.

This brought to mind of a wish I sometimes see in my counseling individuals, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could perhaps undo our negative events, like hitting a reverse switch. But that arrow only points backwards. Facing the reality that this is impossible and embracing the pain and fury for things not happening how we anticipated, rather than a false optimism, can promote a transformation: from denial and depression, to development and opportunity. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be transformative.

We think of depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a repressing of rage and grief and disappointment and joy and vitality, and all the rest. The substitute for depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and liberty.

I have repeatedly found myself stuck in this urge to click “undo”, but my little one is assisting me in moving past it. As a first-time mom, I was at times burdened by the amazing requirements of my baby. 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 finished the task you were doing. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a solace and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What surprised me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the feelings requirements.

I had believed my most important job as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon came to realise that it was not possible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her craving could seem endless; my milk could not come fast enough, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to swap her diaper – 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 embraces we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were separated from us, that no comfort we gave could help.

I soon learned that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to persevere, and then to support her in managing the overwhelming feelings provoked by the impossibility of my protecting her from all discomfort. As she enhanced her skill to ingest and absorb milk, she also had to develop a capacity to digest her emotions and her pain when the milk didn’t come, or when she was in pain, or any other challenging and perplexing experience – and I had to evolve with her (and my) frustration, rage, despair, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to guarantee smooth experiences, but to support in creating understanding to her feelings journey of things not working out ideally.

This was the distinction, for her, between experiencing someone who was seeking to offer her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being helped to grow a ability to feel every emotion. It was the distinction, for me, between desiring to experience wonderful about executing ideally as a ideal parent, and instead building the ability to endure my own shortcomings in order to do a good enough job – and understand my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The contrast between my seeking to prevent her crying, and comprehending when she needed to cry.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel less keenly the wish to click erase and alter our history into one where everything goes well. I find optimism in my awareness of a ability growing inside me to understand that this is not possible, and to understand that, when I’m focused on striving to reschedule a vacation, what I really need is to cry.