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I hope you had a pleasant summer: my experience was different. The very day we were planning to go on holiday, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, expecting him to have prompt but common surgery, which meant our getaway ideas were forced to be cancelled.

From this episode I gained insight valuable, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to feel bad when things go wrong. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more everyday, quietly devastating disappointments that – without the ability to actually acknowledge them – will truly burden us.

When we were expected to be on holiday but weren't, I kept experiencing a pull 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 had truly vanished: my husband’s surgery necessitated frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a finite opportunity for an relaxing trip on the Belgian coast. So, no vacation. Just disappointment and frustration, suffering and attention.

I know more serious issues can happen, it's just a trip, an enviable dilemma 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 cease resisting the disappointment and we addressed it instead, it felt like we were facing it as a team. Instead of experiencing sadness and trying to put on a brave face, I’ve given myself permission all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to anger and frustration and aversion and wrath, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even was feasible to value our days at home together.

This recalled of a hope I sometimes observe in my therapy clients, and that I have also experienced in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could perhaps erase our difficult moments, like hitting a reverse switch. But that button only looks to the past. Facing the reality that this is impossible and embracing the sorrow and anger for things not happening how we anticipated, rather than a false optimism, can enable a shift: from avoidance and sadness, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be transformative.

We view depression as experiencing negativity – but to my mind it’s a kind of dulling of all emotions, a pressing down of rage and grief and frustration and delight and life force, and all the rest. The substitute for depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and release.

I have often found myself stuck in this urge to reverse things, but my young child is helping me to grow out of it. As a new mother, I was at times burdened by the astonishing demands of my infant. Not only the nourishing – 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 changing again before you’ve even completed the task you were handling. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a solace and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, unceasing and exhausting. What shocked me the most – aside from the sleep deprivation – were the feelings requirements.

I had assumed my most important job as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon understood that it was impossible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her appetite could seem unmeetable; my milk could not be produced rapidly, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to change her – but she despised being changed, and cried as if she were plunging into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed comforted by the cuddles we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were separated from us, that no solution we provided could aid.

I soon learned that my most important job as a mother was first to endure, and then to help her digest the intense emotions triggered by the infeasibility of my shielding her from all unease. As she developed her capacity to take in and digest milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to digest her emotions and her distress when the supply was insufficient, or when she was hurting, or any other challenging and perplexing experience – and I had to develop alongside her (and my) irritation, anger, hopelessness, hatred, disappointment, hunger. My job was not to make things go well, but to help bring meaning to her emotional experience of things being less than perfect.

This was the distinction, for her, between being with someone who was seeking to offer her only good feelings, and instead being assisted in developing a ability to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the contrast, for me, between desiring to experience great about performing flawlessly as a flawless caregiver, and instead cultivating the skill to accept my own imperfections in order to do a good enough job – and understand my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The contrast between my trying to stop her crying, and comprehending when she needed to cry.

Now that we have developed beyond this together, I feel not as strongly the urge to click erase and alter our history into one where things are ideal. I find faith in my sense of a ability evolving internally to understand that this is not possible, and to understand that, when I’m busy trying to reschedule a vacation, what I truly require is to sob.