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I hope you had a pleasant summer: mine was not. On the day we were supposed to be go on holiday, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which meant our getaway ideas needed to be cancelled.

From this episode I learned something significant, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to feel bad when things take a turn. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more everyday, quietly devastating disappointments that – unless we can actually feel them – will truly burden us.

When we were supposed to be on holiday but were not, I kept feeling a tug towards seeking optimism: “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 blue. And then I would face the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery involved frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a finite opportunity for an enjoyable break on the Belgian coast. 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 tried that line too. But what I wanted was to be honest with myself. In those instances when I was able to cease resisting the disappointment and we talked about it instead, it felt like we were sharing an experience. Instead of feeling depressed and trying to appear happy, I’ve granted myself all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and hatred and rage, which at least seemed authentic. At times, it even turned out to appreciate our moments at home together.

This reminded me of a desire I sometimes notice in my therapy clients, and that I have also experienced in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could somehow erase our difficult moments, like pressing a reset button. But that arrow only points backwards. Acknowledging the reality that this is not possible and embracing the pain and fury for things not happening how we expected, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can promote a transformation: from avoidance and sadness, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be profoundly impactful.

We think of depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of dulling of all emotions, a pressing down of anger and sadness and frustration and delight and energy, and all the rest. The substitute for depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of honest emotional expression and freedom.

I have frequently found myself stuck in this wish to erase events, but my toddler is helping me to grow out of it. As a new mother, I was at times burdened by the incredible needs of my newborn. Not only the nursing – sometimes for a lengthy period at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the outfit alterations, and then the repeating the process before you’ve even ended the task you were changing. 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, unceasing and exhausting. What surprised me the most – aside from the sleep deprivation – were the psychological needs.

I had believed my most primary duty as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. But I soon understood that it was not possible to meet all of my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her hunger could seem insatiable; my milk could not arrive quickly, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to alter her clothes – 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 nothing we had to offer could help.

I soon realized that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to persevere, and then to help her digest the intense emotions caused by the infeasibility of my shielding her from all unease. As she enhanced her skill to consume and process milk, she also had to develop a capacity to process her feelings and her suffering when the milk didn’t come, or when she was suffering, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to develop alongside her (and my) annoyance, fury, despondency, hatred, disappointment, hunger. My job was not to guarantee smooth experiences, but to assist in finding significance to her feelings journey of things being less than perfect.

This was the difference, for her, between having someone who was seeking to offer her only good feelings, and instead being supported in building a skill to feel every emotion. It was the contrast, for me, between desiring to experience wonderful about performing flawlessly as a flawless caregiver, and instead developing the capacity to endure my own imperfections in order to do a adequately performed – and understand my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The distinction between my trying to stop her crying, and recognizing when she required to weep.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel reduced the wish to press reverse and rewrite our story into one where all is perfect. I find hope in my sense of a capacity evolving internally to understand that this is impossible, and to understand that, when I’m busy trying to rebook a holiday, what I really need is to cry.