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I trust your a enjoyable summer: I did not. That day we were scheduled to travel for leisure, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, expecting him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which meant our travel plans had to be cancelled.

From this episode I realized a truth significant, all over again, about how hard it is for me to experience sadness when things take a turn. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more routine, gently heartbreaking disappointments that – if we don't actually experience them – will really weigh us down.

When we were meant to be on holiday but were not, I kept sensing an urge towards seeking optimism: “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 required frequent uncomfortable wound care, and there is a limited time window for an enjoyable break on the Belgian coast. So, no vacation. Just disappointment and frustration, suffering and attention.

I know more serious issues can happen, it’s only a holiday, such a fortunate concern to have – I know because I tried that line too. But what I needed was to be sincere with my feelings. In those moments when I was able to halt battling the disappointment and we talked about it instead, it felt like we were facing it as a team. Instead of being down and trying to appear happy, I’ve granted myself all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and loathing and fury, which at least seemed authentic. At times, it even was feasible to enjoy our time at home together.

This brought to mind of a hope I sometimes notice in my therapy clients, and that I have also seen in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could in some way erase our difficult moments, like pressing a reset button. But that button only points backwards. Acknowledging the reality that this is impossible and embracing the grief and rage for things not happening how we hoped, rather than a insincere positive spin, can facilitate a change of current: from rejection and low mood, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be life-changing.

We consider depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a suppressing of rage and grief and disappointment and joy and life force, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and liberty.

I have frequently found myself trapped in this desire to click “undo”, but my young child is assisting me in moving past it. As a first-time mom, I was at times overwhelmed by the incredible needs of my infant. Not only the feeding – sometimes for more than 60 minutes at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the diaper swaps, and then the repeating the process before you’ve even completed the swap you were doing. These routine valuable duties among so many others – efficiency blended with affection – are a reassurance and a significant blessing. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What astounded me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the feelings requirements.

I had thought my most important job as a mother was to fulfill my infant's requirements. But I soon understood that it was unfeasible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her craving could seem unmeetable; my supply could not be produced rapidly, or it came too fast. And then we needed to alter her clothes – but she disliked being changed, and cried as if she were plunging into a gloomy abyss of despair. And while sometimes she seemed soothed by the embraces we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were distant from us, that no comfort we gave could assist.

I soon realized that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to survive, and then to support her in managing the powerful sentiments triggered by the infeasibility of my shielding her from all discomfort. As she developed her capacity to consume and process milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to manage her sentiments and her distress when the nourishment was delayed, or when she was hurting, or any other hard and bewildering experience – and I had to develop alongside her (and my) annoyance, fury, despondency, loathing, discontent, need. My job was not to make things go well, but to assist in finding significance to her sentimental path of things being less than perfect.

This was the contrast, for her, between experiencing someone who was trying to give her only good feelings, and instead being assisted in developing a ability to experience all feelings. It was the difference, for me, between desiring to experience wonderful about performing flawlessly as a ideal parent, and instead developing the capacity to endure my own imperfections in order to do a sufficiently well – and grasp my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The difference between my trying to stop her crying, and understanding when she needed to cry.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel less keenly the urge to hit “undo” and rewrite our story into one where all is perfect. I find hope in my feeling of a capacity developing within to acknowledge that this is unattainable, and to realize that, when I’m busy trying to reschedule a vacation, what I actually want is to weep.