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I hope you had a enjoyable summer: my experience was different. That day we were supposed to be travel for leisure, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have prompt but common surgery, which caused our travel plans had to be cancelled.

From this experience I gained insight significant, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to feel bad when things don't work out. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more routine, quietly devastating disappointments that – without the ability to actually acknowledge them – will really weigh us down.

When we were expected to be on holiday but weren't, I kept feeling a tug 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 never felt better, just a bit blue. And then I would bump up against the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery necessitated frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a short period for an enjoyable break on the shores of Belgium. So, no vacation. Just letdown and irritation, hurt and nurturing.

I know more serious issues can happen, it's just a trip, what a privileged problem to have – I know because I tested that argument too. But what I needed was to be honest with myself. In those instances when I was able to stop fighting off the disappointment and we addressed it instead, it felt like we were facing it as a team. Instead of feeling depressed and trying to smile, I’ve granted myself all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and hatred and rage, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even was feasible to value our days at home together.

This reminded me of a wish I sometimes notice in my counseling individuals, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could in some way erase our difficult moments, like hitting a reverse switch. But that option only looks to the past. Acknowledging the reality that this is impossible and embracing the pain and fury for things not happening how we hoped, rather than a insincere positive spin, can enable a shift: from avoidance and sadness, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it needs duration – this can be transformative.

We consider depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of dulling of all emotions, a pressing down of frustration and sorrow and disappointment and joy and energy, and all the rest. The substitute for depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, 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 helping me to grow out of it. As a recent parent, I was at times burdened by the incredible needs of my baby. Not only the nursing – sometimes for more than 60 minutes at a time, and then again less than an hour after that – and not only the changing, and then the changing again before you’ve even finished the swap you were doing. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a reassurance and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, persistent and tiring. What surprised me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the feelings requirements.

I had believed my most key role as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon came to realise that it was unfeasible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her hunger could seem insatiable; my milk could not come fast enough, or it came too fast. And then we needed to alter her clothes – but she disliked being changed, and cried as if she were falling into a shadowy pit of misery. And while sometimes she seemed comforted by the embraces we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were distant from us, that nothing we had to offer could aid.

I soon learned that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to persevere, and then to help her digest the intense emotions triggered by the unattainability of my shielding her from all discomfort. As she grew her ability to consume and process milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to digest her emotions and her suffering when the supply was insufficient, or when she was suffering, or any other hard and bewildering 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 distinction, for her, between experiencing someone who was attempting to provide her only good feelings, and instead being assisted in developing a skill to experience all feelings. It was the distinction, for me, between aiming to have excellent about executing ideally as a ideal parent, and instead cultivating the skill to accept my own shortcomings in order to do a sufficiently well – and comprehend my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The difference between my seeking to prevent her crying, and understanding when she had to sob.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel reduced the wish to press reverse and change our narrative into one where everything goes well. I find hope in my sense of a ability evolving internally to understand that this is not possible, and to understand that, when I’m focused on striving to rearrange a trip, what I actually want is to sob.