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I trust your a pleasant summer: I did not. That day we were planning to take a vacation, I was sitting in 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 experience I learned something valuable, all over again, about how hard it is for me to feel bad when things take a turn. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more everyday, quietly devastating disappointments that – without the ability to actually feel them – will truly burden us.

When we were meant to be on holiday but were not, 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 down. And then I would confront the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery required frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a short period for an relaxing trip on the Belgian coast. So, no vacation. Just letdown and irritation, hurt and nurturing.

I know graver situations can happen, it's just a trip, what a privileged problem to have – I know because I used that reasoning too. But what I wanted was to be honest with myself. In those instances when I was able to stop fighting off the disappointment and we discussed it instead, it felt like we were going through something together. Instead of feeling depressed and trying to appear happy, I’ve granted myself all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to anger and frustration and hatred and rage, which at least felt real. At times, it even became possible to value our days at home together.

This recalled of a desire I sometimes see in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also experienced in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could somehow undo our negative events, like hitting a reverse switch. But that button only points backwards. Confronting the reality that this is impossible and accepting the grief and rage for things not turning out how we hoped, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can promote a transformation: from denial and depression, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it needs duration – this can be transformative.

We consider depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of deadening of all emotions, a repressing of frustration and sorrow and disappointment and joy 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 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 a lengthy period at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the outfit alterations, and then the doing it once more before you’ve even finished the change you were handling. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – efficiency blended with affection – are a solace and a significant blessing. Though they’re also, at moments, persistent and tiring. What surprised me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the emotional demands.

I had thought my most important job as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. But I soon realized that it was not possible to meet all of my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her craving could seem endless; my nourishment could not be produced rapidly, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to alter her clothes – but she hated being changed, and sobbed as if she were plunging into a shadowy pit of misery. And while sometimes she seemed consoled by the embraces we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were lost to us, that no comfort we gave could help.

I soon realized that my most crucial role as a mother was first to persevere, and then to assist her process the intense emotions provoked by the infeasibility of my shielding her from all discomfort. As she developed her capacity to take in and digest milk, she also had to develop a capacity to process her feelings and her distress when the milk didn’t come, or when she was hurting, or any other challenging and perplexing experience – and I had to develop alongside her (and my) frustration, rage, despair, loathing, discontent, need. My job was not to guarantee smooth experiences, but to help bring meaning to her sentimental path of things not working out ideally.

This was the difference, for her, between experiencing someone who was trying to give her only positive emotions, and instead being supported in building a ability to feel every emotion. It was the contrast, for me, between desiring to experience great about performing flawlessly as a flawless caregiver, and instead developing the capacity to endure my own imperfections in order to do a good enough job – and comprehend my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The difference between my attempting to halt her crying, and understanding when she had to sob.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel less keenly the wish to click erase and alter our history into one where things are ideal. I find hope in my awareness of a ability evolving internally to understand that this is unattainable, and to understand that, when I’m busy trying to rearrange a trip, what I actually want is to sob.