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I wish you enjoyed a enjoyable summer: my experience was different. The very day we were planning to take a vacation, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have urgent but routine surgery, which resulted in our travel plans needed to be cancelled.

From this experience I gained insight 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 common, quietly devastating disappointments that – without the ability to actually acknowledge them – will truly burden us.

When we were expected 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 never felt better, just a bit depressed. And then I would bump up against the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery necessitated frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a limited time window for an enjoyable break on the Belgium's beaches. So, no holiday. Just letdown and irritation, pain and care.

I know graver situations can happen, it's just a trip, such a fortunate concern to have – I know because I used that reasoning too. But what I wanted was to be truthful to myself. In those moments when I was able to halt battling the disappointment and we talked about 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 given myself permission all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and hatred and rage, which at least seemed authentic. At times, it even turned out to enjoy our time at home together.

This brought to mind of a wish I sometimes notice in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could in some way undo our negative events, like hitting a reverse switch. But that button only looks to the past. Acknowledging the reality that this is unattainable and accepting the sorrow and anger for things not happening how we anticipated, rather than a insincere positive spin, can facilitate a change of current: from denial and depression, to progress and potential. 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 life force, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of honest emotional expression and liberty.

I have frequently found myself stuck in this wish to click “undo”, but my toddler is assisting me in moving past it. As a new mother, I was at times swamped by the astonishing demands of my infant. Not only the nursing – sometimes for more than 60 minutes at a time, and then again less than an hour after that – and not only the changing, and then the repeating the process before you’ve even ended the change you were doing. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – efficiency blended with affection – are a reassurance and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What shocked me the most – aside from the sleep deprivation – were the feelings requirements.

I had believed my most key role as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon came to realise that it was unfeasible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her appetite could seem unmeetable; my supply could not arrive quickly, or it came too fast. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she disliked being changed, and cried as if she were descending into a gloomy abyss of despair. And while sometimes she seemed comforted by the embraces we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were separated from us, that nothing we had to offer could assist.

I soon discovered that my most important job as a mother was first to persevere, and then to support her in managing the overwhelming feelings triggered by the unattainability of my guarding her from all discomfort. As she enhanced her skill 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 suffering, or any other challenging and perplexing experience – and I had to develop alongside her (and my) frustration, rage, despair, hatred, disappointment, hunger. My job was not to make things go well, but to assist in finding significance to her feelings journey of things not working out ideally.

This was the contrast, for her, between being with someone who was seeking to offer her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being assisted in developing a skill to feel every emotion. It was the difference, for me, between aiming to have excellent about doing a perfect job as a ideal parent, and instead building the ability to accept my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a adequately performed – and understand my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The contrast 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 desire to press reverse and change our narrative into one where things are ideal. I find faith in my feeling of a capacity developing within to acknowledge that this is impossible, and to understand that, when I’m occupied with attempting to rearrange a trip, what I truly require is to cry.