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I trust your a good summer: mine was not. The very day we were scheduled to travel for leisure, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which meant our vacation arrangements needed to be cancelled.

From this situation I realized a truth important, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to experience sadness when things take a turn. I’m not talking about major catastrophes, but the more everyday, subtly crushing disappointments that – if we don't actually experience them – will significantly depress us.

When we were meant to be on holiday but could not be, I kept sensing an urge 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 remained low, just a bit depressed. And then I would face the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery necessitated frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a finite opportunity for an enjoyable break on the Belgium's beaches. So, no getaway. Just letdown and irritation, suffering and attention.

I know more serious issues can happen, it’s only a holiday, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I used that reasoning too. But what I needed was to be honest with myself. In those times when I was able to stop fighting off the disappointment and we discussed it instead, it felt like we were going through something together. Instead of experiencing sadness and trying to put on a brave face, I’ve allowed 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 wish I sometimes notice in my counseling individuals, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could somehow reverse our unwanted experiences, like clicking “undo”. But that button only looks to the past. Confronting the reality that this is unattainable and allowing the sorrow and anger for things not happening how we expected, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can facilitate a change of current: from denial and depression, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be transformative.

We think of depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of deadening of all emotions, a repressing of anger and sadness and letdown and happiness and vitality, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but acknowledging every sentiment, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and liberty.

I have frequently found myself stuck in this urge to reverse things, but my toddler is assisting me in moving past it. As a new mother, I was at times swamped by the amazing requirements of my baby. Not only the nourishing – sometimes for more than 60 minutes at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the diaper swaps, and then the repeating the process before you’ve even ended the task 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, unceasing and exhausting. What surprised me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the emotional demands.

I had thought my most primary duty as a mother was to fulfill my infant's requirements. But I soon realized that it was unfeasible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her appetite could seem unmeetable; my nourishment could not come fast enough, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to change her – but she despised being changed, and sobbed as if she were plunging into a shadowy pit of misery. And while sometimes she seemed soothed 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 discovered that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to endure, and then to assist her process the overwhelming feelings provoked by the unattainability of my protecting her from all distress. As she grew her ability to take in and digest milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to digest her emotions and her suffering when the nourishment was delayed, or when she was in pain, or any other challenging and perplexing experience – and I had to evolve with her (and my) irritation, anger, hopelessness, hatred, disappointment, hunger. My job was not to guarantee smooth experiences, but to support in creating understanding to her sentimental path of things not going so well.

This was the distinction, for her, between having someone who was attempting to provide her only good feelings, and instead being assisted in developing a ability to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the difference, for me, between aiming to have great about performing flawlessly as a flawless caregiver, and instead building the ability to tolerate my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a good enough job – and grasp my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The distinction between my seeking to prevent her crying, and recognizing when she had to sob.

Now that we have developed beyond this together, I feel reduced the desire to press reverse and alter our history into one where all is perfect. I find hope in my awareness of a capacity evolving internally to recognise that this is not possible, and to comprehend that, when I’m focused on striving to rebook a holiday, what I truly require is to sob.