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I hope you had a pleasant summer: I did not. The very day we were planning to take a vacation, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have urgent but routine surgery, which caused our travel plans were forced to be cancelled.

From this experience I learned something significant, all over again, about how hard it is for me to acknowledge pain when things go wrong. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more routine, subtly crushing disappointments that – unless we can 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 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 confront the reality that this holiday had truly vanished: my husband’s surgery involved frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a finite opportunity for an relaxing trip on the Belgium's beaches. So, no getaway. Just letdown and irritation, suffering and attention.

I know graver situations can happen, it’s only a holiday, what a privileged problem to have – I know because I tested that argument too. But what I wanted was to be honest with myself. In those moments when I was able to stop fighting off the disappointment and we talked about it instead, it felt like we were sharing an experience. Instead of being down and trying to appear happy, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and hatred and rage, which at least felt real. At times, it even became possible to appreciate our moments at home together.

This reminded me of a hope I sometimes notice in my counseling individuals, and that I have also experienced in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could somehow 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 allowing the pain and fury for things not turning out how we anticipated, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can enable a shift: from denial and depression, to development and opportunity. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be profoundly impactful.

We view depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of deadening of all emotions, a pressing down of anger and sadness and disappointment and joy and energy, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and freedom.

I have repeatedly found myself trapped in this wish to click “undo”, but my little one is helping me to grow out of it. As a first-time mom, I was at times overwhelmed by the amazing requirements of my newborn. Not only the nourishing – sometimes for more than 60 minutes at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the changing, and then the doing it once more before you’ve even completed the change you were handling. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a solace and a significant blessing. Though they’re also, at moments, unceasing and exhausting. What shocked me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the feelings requirements.

I had thought my most important job as a mother was to fulfill my infant's requirements. But I soon came to realise that it was impossible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her appetite could seem endless; my milk could not arrive quickly, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she hated being changed, and sobbed as if she were plunging into a gloomy abyss of despair. And while sometimes she seemed soothed by the embraces 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 important job as a mother was first to survive, and then to support her in managing the overwhelming feelings caused by the unattainability of my guarding her from all distress. As she grew her ability to take in and digest milk, she also had to build an ability to process her feelings and her distress when the nourishment was delayed, or when she was hurting, or any other challenging and perplexing experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) irritation, anger, hopelessness, loathing, discontent, need. My job was not to make things go well, but to help bring meaning to her sentimental path of things not going so well.

This was the distinction, for her, between experiencing someone who was seeking to offer her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being assisted in developing a ability to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the distinction, for me, between wanting to feel wonderful about executing ideally as a perfect mother, and instead cultivating the skill to endure my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a sufficiently well – and understand my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The distinction between my attempting to halt her crying, and comprehending when she needed to cry.

Now that we have developed beyond this together, I feel reduced the urge to click erase and change our narrative into one where things are ideal. I find faith in my feeling of a capacity growing inside me to recognise that this is unattainable, and to understand that, when I’m occupied with attempting to reschedule a vacation, what I really need is to sob.