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I trust your a pleasant summer: my experience was different. That day we were planning to go on holiday, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, expecting him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which resulted in our vacation arrangements were forced to be cancelled.

From this situation I learned something significant, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to feel bad when things take a turn. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more everyday, subtly crushing disappointments that – if we don't actually experience them – will significantly depress us.

When we were expected to be on holiday but could not be, I kept feeling a tug towards looking for silver linings: “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 bump up against the reality that this holiday had truly vanished: my husband’s surgery necessitated frequent uncomfortable wound care, and there is a short period for an pleasant vacation on the shores of Belgium. 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 tested that argument too. But what I required was to be truthful to myself. In those times 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 given myself permission all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment 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 observe in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also seen in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could perhaps erase our difficult moments, like hitting a reverse switch. But that button only goes in reverse. Confronting the reality that this is not possible and embracing the pain and fury for things not happening how we expected, rather than a false optimism, can promote a transformation: from avoidance and sadness, to development and opportunity. Over time – and, of course, it needs duration – this can be profoundly impactful.

We think of depression as experiencing negativity – but to my mind it’s a kind of deadening of all emotions, a suppressing of rage and grief and frustration and delight and life force, and all the rest. The substitute for depression is not happiness, but acknowledging every sentiment, a kind of honest emotional expression and liberty.

I have often found myself stuck in this urge to click “undo”, but my young child is assisting me in moving past it. As a new mother, I was at times swamped by the amazing requirements of my infant. 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 changing, and then the doing it once more before you’ve even ended the change you were changing. These routine valuable duties among so many others – efficiency blended with affection – are a solace and a tremendous privilege. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What surprised me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the psychological needs.

I had thought my most primary duty as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. 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 craving could seem endless; my nourishment could not arrive quickly, or it came too fast. And then we needed to alter her clothes – but she disliked being changed, and sobbed as if she were plunging into a gloomy abyss of despair. And while sometimes she seemed comforted by the cuddles we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were distant from us, that no solution we provided could help.

I soon learned that my most important job as a mother was first to survive, and then to help her digest the overwhelming feelings provoked by the unattainability of my shielding her from all unease. As she developed her capacity to consume and process milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to digest her emotions and her distress when the milk didn’t come, or when she was in pain, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) annoyance, fury, despondency, aversion, letdown, craving. 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 being with someone who was seeking to offer her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being helped to grow a capacity to feel every emotion. It was the distinction, for me, between desiring to experience wonderful about executing ideally as a ideal parent, and instead developing the capacity to tolerate my own shortcomings in order to do a sufficiently well – and comprehend my daughter’s letdown and frustration with me. The contrast between my seeking to prevent her crying, and comprehending when she had to sob.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel not as strongly the desire to hit “undo” and alter our history into one where everything goes well. I find hope in my awareness of a ability growing inside me to understand that this is impossible, and to comprehend that, when I’m busy trying to rearrange a trip, what I truly require is to cry.