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I trust your a pleasant summer: mine was not. That day we were supposed to be travel for leisure, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which resulted in our vacation arrangements were forced to be cancelled.

From this situation I realized a truth significant, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to experience sadness when things go wrong. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more common, subtly crushing disappointments that – without the ability to actually acknowledge them – will significantly depress us.

When we were expected to be on holiday but could not be, I kept experiencing a pull 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 down. And then I would bump up against the reality that this holiday really was gone: 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 vacation. Just discontent and annoyance, hurt and nurturing.

I know more serious issues can happen, it's just a trip, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I tested that argument too. But what I wanted was to be truthful to myself. In those instances when I was able to stop fighting off 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 granted myself all sorts of unpleasant emotions, including but not limited to anger and frustration and aversion and wrath, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even became possible to value our days at home together.

This brought to mind of a desire I sometimes notice in my counseling individuals, 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 arrow only goes in reverse. Facing the reality that this is unattainable and accepting the sorrow and anger for things not turning out how we expected, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can facilitate a change of current: from denial and depression, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it needs duration – this can be life-changing.

We consider depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a suppressing of rage and grief and disappointment and joy and energy, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and freedom.

I have frequently found myself stuck in this urge to erase events, but my toddler is helping me to grow out of it. As a recent parent, I was at times burdened by the amazing requirements of my infant. Not only the nursing – sometimes for over an hour at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the outfit alterations, and then the changing again before you’ve even completed the change you were doing. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a comfort and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, unceasing and exhausting. 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 realized that it was impossible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her appetite could seem insatiable; my supply could not come fast enough, or it came too fast. And then we needed to change her – but she hated being changed, and cried as if she were falling into a shadowy pit of misery. And while sometimes she seemed soothed by the hugs we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were separated from us, that no solution we provided could help.

I soon realized that my most crucial role as a mother was first to survive, and then to assist her process the intense emotions provoked by the unattainability of my shielding her from all distress. As she developed her capacity to ingest and absorb milk, she also had to build an ability to manage her sentiments and her suffering when the milk didn’t come, or when she was suffering, or any other hard and bewildering experience – and I had to evolve with her (and my) annoyance, fury, despondency, hatred, disappointment, hunger. My job was not to ensure everything was perfect, but to support in creating understanding to her emotional experience of things not going so well.

This was the difference, for her, between being with someone who was seeking to offer her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being helped to grow a ability to feel every emotion. It was the contrast, for me, between wanting to feel wonderful about performing flawlessly as a flawless caregiver, and instead cultivating the skill to endure my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a sufficiently well – and comprehend my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The distinction between my seeking to prevent her crying, and understanding when she had to sob.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel not as strongly the urge to press reverse and alter our history into one where things are ideal. I find faith in my awareness of a ability developing within to understand that this is unattainable, and to comprehend that, when I’m occupied with attempting to reschedule a vacation, what I really need is to cry.