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I trust your a good summer: mine was not. On the day we were scheduled to take a vacation, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, expecting him to have prompt but common surgery, which meant our vacation arrangements had to be cancelled.

From this situation I gained insight valuable, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to experience sadness when things don't work out. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more everyday, gently heartbreaking disappointments that – if we don't actually acknowledge them – will truly burden us.

When we were meant to be on holiday but were not, 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 didn't improve, just a bit blue. And then I would face the reality that this holiday had truly vanished: my husband’s surgery necessitated frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a limited time window for an pleasant vacation on the Belgian coast. So, no holiday. Just letdown and irritation, suffering and attention.

I know more serious issues can happen, it's merely a vacation, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I used that reasoning too. But what I wanted was to be truthful to myself. In those instances when I was able to halt battling the disappointment and we talked about it instead, it felt like we were sharing an experience. Instead of experiencing sadness and trying to appear happy, I’ve granted myself all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to anger and frustration and hatred and rage, which at least felt real. At times, it even turned out to value our days at home together.

This brought to mind of a desire I sometimes see in my counseling individuals, and that I have also experienced in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could perhaps reverse our unwanted experiences, like pressing a reset button. But that option only goes in reverse. Facing the reality that this is unattainable and allowing the pain and fury for things not happening how we hoped, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can facilitate a change of current: from avoidance and sadness, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be life-changing.

We consider depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of deadening of all emotions, a suppressing of anger and sadness and disappointment and joy and life force, 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 repeatedly found myself trapped in this desire to click “undo”, but my young child is assisting me in moving past 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 less than an hour after that – and not only the changing, and then the changing again before you’ve even ended the change you were handling. These routine valuable duties among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a solace and a tremendous privilege. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What shocked me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the emotional demands.

I had believed my most important job as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. But I soon came to realise that it was unfeasible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her craving could seem endless; my milk could not be produced rapidly, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to alter her clothes – but she disliked being changed, and sobbed as if she were descending into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed comforted by the cuddles we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were lost to us, that no comfort we gave could aid.

I soon realized that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to survive, and then to support her in managing the intense emotions provoked by the unattainability of my protecting her from all distress. As she grew her ability to consume and process milk, she also had to build an ability to digest her emotions and her pain when the milk didn’t come, or when she was in pain, or any other hard and bewildering experience – and I had to evolve with her (and my) frustration, rage, despair, hatred, disappointment, hunger. My job was not to make things go well, but to support in creating understanding to her feelings journey of things not going so well.

This was the contrast, for her, between experiencing someone who was attempting to provide her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being assisted in developing a ability to experience all feelings. It was the contrast, for me, between wanting to feel excellent about executing ideally as a perfect mother, and instead developing the capacity to endure my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a sufficiently well – and grasp my daughter’s letdown and frustration with me. The distinction between my trying to stop her crying, and recognizing when she required to weep.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel less keenly the desire to click erase and alter our history into one where everything goes well. I find hope in my sense of a skill developing within to understand that this is unattainable, and to comprehend that, when I’m focused on striving to rearrange a trip, what I truly require is to cry.