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I wish you enjoyed a good summer: I did not. The very day we were scheduled to go on holiday, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which meant our vacation arrangements were forced to be cancelled.

From this experience I learned something important, all over again, about how hard it is for me to feel bad when things don't work out. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more common, quietly devastating disappointments that – if we don't actually feel them – will truly burden us.

When we were meant to be on holiday but weren't, 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 blue. And then I would confront the reality that this holiday had truly vanished: my husband’s surgery necessitated frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a finite opportunity for an pleasant vacation on the shores of Belgium. So, no vacation. Just letdown and irritation, pain and care.

I know more serious issues 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 moments when I was able to cease resisting the disappointment and we talked about 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 bitterness and resentment and loathing and fury, which at least felt real. At times, it even became possible to value our days at home together.

This reminded me of a desire I sometimes notice in my counseling individuals, and that I have also seen in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could somehow undo our negative events, like clicking “undo”. But that arrow only goes in reverse. Acknowledging the reality that this is unattainable and embracing the pain and fury for things not happening how we anticipated, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can promote a transformation: from avoidance and sadness, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it needs duration – this can be profoundly impactful.

We view depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a repressing of frustration and sorrow and frustration and delight and energy, and all the rest. The substitute for depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and liberty.

I have frequently found myself trapped in this wish to click “undo”, but my toddler is helping me to grow out of it. As a recent parent, I was at times swamped by the incredible needs of my infant. Not only the feeding – sometimes for a lengthy period at a time, and then again less than an hour after that – and not only the outfit alterations, and then the doing it once more before you’ve even finished the swap you were changing. These routine valuable duties among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a solace 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 feelings requirements.

I had assumed my most important job as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon came to realise that it was unfeasible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her appetite could seem unmeetable; my supply could not come fast enough, or it came too fast. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she disliked being changed, and wept as if she were falling into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed comforted 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 key responsibility as a mother was first to survive, and then to support her in managing the overwhelming feelings caused by the infeasibility of my guarding her from all distress. As she grew her ability to take in and digest milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to process her feelings and her distress when the nourishment was delayed, or when she was in pain, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to develop alongside her (and my) annoyance, fury, despondency, hatred, disappointment, hunger. My job was not to make things go well, but to help bring meaning to her emotional experience of things not going so well.

This was the distinction, for her, between having someone who was trying to give her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being helped to grow a skill to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the contrast, for me, between aiming to have great about executing ideally as a ideal parent, and instead building the ability to accept my own shortcomings in order to do a good enough job – and comprehend my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The distinction 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 wish to hit “undo” and rewrite our story into one where all is perfect. I find optimism in my sense of a capacity evolving internally to understand that this is impossible, and to realize that, when I’m busy trying to rebook a holiday, what I truly require is to sob.