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I wish you enjoyed a good summer: my experience was different. The very day we were planning to take a vacation, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, expecting him to have urgent but routine surgery, which meant our travel plans needed to be cancelled.

From this experience I realized a truth important, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to acknowledge pain when things go wrong. I’m not talking about major catastrophes, but the more everyday, gently heartbreaking disappointments that – unless we can actually acknowledge them – will truly burden us.

When we were meant to be on holiday but could not be, I kept experiencing a pull 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 depressed. And then I would bump up against the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery involved frequent uncomfortable wound care, and there is a short period for an enjoyable break on the Belgian coast. So, no vacation. Just disappointment and frustration, hurt and nurturing.

I know worse things can happen, it's just a trip, such a fortunate concern to have – I know because I used that reasoning too. But what I wanted was to be sincere with my feelings. In those instances when I was able to stop fighting off the disappointment and we discussed it instead, it felt like we were sharing an experience. Instead of experiencing sadness and trying to appear happy, I’ve given myself permission all sorts of unpleasant emotions, including but not limited to anger and frustration and loathing and fury, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even was feasible to enjoy our time at home together.

This reminded me of a hope I sometimes observe in my counseling individuals, and that I have also experienced in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could somehow reverse our unwanted experiences, like hitting a reverse switch. But that option only goes in reverse. Confronting the reality that this is impossible and accepting the pain and fury for things not turning out how we anticipated, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can facilitate a change of current: from avoidance and sadness, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be life-changing.

We view depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a pressing down of anger and sadness and disappointment and joy and energy, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and freedom.

I have repeatedly found myself caught in this wish to reverse things, but my toddler is assisting me in moving past it. As a recent parent, I was at times overwhelmed by the astonishing demands of my newborn. Not only the feeding – sometimes for more than 60 minutes at a time, and then again under 60 minutes after that – and not only the changing, and then the repeating the process before you’ve even finished the change you were doing. These everyday important activities among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a solace and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What astounded me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the emotional demands.

I had assumed my most key role as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. But I soon came to realise that it was unfeasible to meet all of my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her appetite could seem endless; my supply could not be produced rapidly, or it came too fast. And then we needed to alter her clothes – but she despised being changed, and sobbed as if she were plunging into a shadowy pit of misery. And while sometimes she seemed comforted by the cuddles we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were distant from us, that no solution we provided could aid.

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 unease. As she grew her ability to take in and digest milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to digest her emotions and her pain when the nourishment was delayed, or when she was in pain, or any other hard and bewildering experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) frustration, rage, despair, hatred, disappointment, hunger. My job was not to guarantee smooth experiences, but to assist in finding significance to her sentimental path of things not working out ideally.

This was the difference, for her, between experiencing someone who was trying to give her only good feelings, and instead being assisted in developing a capacity to feel every emotion. It was the difference, for me, between aiming to have wonderful about executing ideally as a perfect mother, and instead cultivating the skill to tolerate my own shortcomings in order to do a sufficiently well – and understand my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The distinction between my trying to stop her crying, and understanding when she had to sob.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel less keenly the desire to press reverse and change our narrative into one where everything goes well. I find optimism in my sense of a capacity evolving internally to acknowledge that this is not possible, and to understand that, when I’m focused on striving to reschedule a vacation, what I actually want is to sob.