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

From this episode I learned something valuable, 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, gently heartbreaking disappointments that – unless we can actually feel them – will significantly depress us.

When we were meant to be on holiday but could not be, I kept experiencing a pull 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 blue. And then I would bump up against the reality that this holiday had truly vanished: my husband’s surgery necessitated frequent uncomfortable wound care, and there is a finite opportunity for an enjoyable break on the Belgium's beaches. So, no getaway. Just discontent and annoyance, hurt and nurturing.

I know graver situations can happen, it's merely a vacation, what a privileged problem to have – I know because I tested that argument too. But what I required was to be sincere with my feelings. In those instances when I was able to cease resisting the disappointment and we discussed 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 loathing and fury, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even turned out to appreciate our moments at home together.

This reminded me of a desire I sometimes observe in my therapy clients, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could perhaps erase our difficult moments, like hitting a reverse switch. But that option only looks to the past. Confronting the reality that this is impossible and accepting the sorrow and anger for things not happening how we expected, rather than a insincere positive spin, can facilitate a change of current: from avoidance and sadness, 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 numbing of all emotions, a repressing of frustration and sorrow and disappointment and joy and vitality, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and release.

I have often found myself trapped in this urge 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 astonishing demands of my infant. Not only the nourishing – sometimes for a lengthy period 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 task you were changing. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a reassurance and a significant blessing. Though they’re also, at moments, persistent and tiring. What shocked me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the emotional demands.

I had thought my most key role as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon realized that it was impossible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her appetite could seem endless; my milk could not be produced rapidly, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to alter her clothes – but she despised being changed, and cried 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 distant from us, that nothing we had to offer could help.

I soon discovered that my most important job as a mother was first to survive, and then to help her digest the powerful sentiments triggered by the unattainability of my protecting her from all distress. As she grew her ability to ingest and absorb milk, she also had to build an ability to manage her sentiments and her suffering when the nourishment was delayed, or when she was hurting, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to evolve with her (and my) frustration, rage, despair, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to make things go well, but to help bring meaning to her sentimental path of things being less than perfect.

This was the contrast, for her, between being with someone who was trying to give her only good feelings, and instead being assisted in developing a skill to feel every emotion. It was the difference, for me, between aiming to have great about performing flawlessly as a ideal parent, and instead cultivating the skill to accept my own imperfections in order to do a sufficiently well – and grasp my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The distinction between my seeking to prevent her crying, and comprehending when she required to weep.

Now that we have developed beyond this together, I feel reduced the wish to click erase and alter our history into one where things are ideal. I find hope in my awareness of a skill growing inside me to acknowledge that this is unattainable, and to realize that, when I’m occupied with attempting to rearrange a trip, what I really need is to cry.