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I wish you enjoyed a enjoyable summer: mine was not. That day we were scheduled to take a vacation, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which caused our vacation arrangements had to be cancelled.

From this episode I realized a truth 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 life-altering traumas, but the more common, gently heartbreaking disappointments that – if we don't actually experience them – will really weigh us down.

When we were expected to be on holiday but weren't, I kept sensing an urge 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 face the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery required frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a short period for an relaxing trip on the shores of Belgium. So, no holiday. Just letdown and irritation, suffering and attention.

I know worse things can happen, it's just a trip, 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 instances when I was able to cease resisting the disappointment and we addressed it instead, it felt like we were sharing an experience. Instead of being down and trying to smile, I’ve given myself permission all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and aversion and wrath, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even was feasible to value our days at home together.

This brought to mind of a wish I sometimes observe in my counseling individuals, and that I have also experienced in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could perhaps undo our negative events, like clicking “undo”. But that arrow only looks to the past. Confronting the reality that this is impossible and allowing the pain and fury for things not working out how we hoped, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can facilitate a change of current: from avoidance and sadness, to growth and possibility. 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 deadening of all emotions, a pressing down of anger and sadness and disappointment and joy and vitality, and all the rest. The substitute for depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and release.

I have frequently found myself trapped in this wish to click “undo”, but my little one is supporting my evolution. As a recent parent, I was at times swamped by the amazing requirements of my newborn. Not only the feeding – sometimes for more than 60 minutes at a time, and then again less than an hour after that – and not only the diaper swaps, and then the doing it once more before you’ve even finished 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, relentless and draining. What shocked me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the feelings requirements.

I had thought my most primary duty as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon understood that it was unfeasible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her craving could seem insatiable; my nourishment could not come fast enough, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to alter her clothes – but she disliked being changed, and wept as if she were falling into a gloomy abyss of despair. And while sometimes she seemed consoled by the cuddles we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were lost to us, that no solution we provided could help.

I soon discovered that my most important job as a mother was first to persevere, and then to assist her process the intense emotions provoked by the unattainability of my protecting her from all distress. As she grew her ability to ingest and absorb milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to digest her emotions and her pain when the milk didn’t come, or when she was hurting, or any other challenging and perplexing experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) frustration, rage, despair, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to make things go well, but to support in creating understanding to her sentimental path of things not going so well.

This was the contrast, for her, between being with someone who was attempting to provide her only positive emotions, and instead being assisted in developing a ability to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the difference, for me, between desiring to experience wonderful about executing ideally as a ideal parent, and instead building the ability to tolerate my own imperfections in order to do a good enough job – and understand my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The difference between my attempting to halt her crying, and comprehending when she needed to cry.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel less keenly the urge to press reverse and change our narrative into one where everything goes well. I find optimism in my awareness of a skill growing inside me to understand that this is not possible, and to understand that, when I’m busy trying to reschedule a vacation, what I actually want is to weep.