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I trust your a pleasant summer: mine was not. On the day we were supposed to be go on holiday, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which meant our getaway ideas had to be cancelled.

From this situation I learned something valuable, all over again, about how hard it is for me to experience sadness when things go wrong. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more common, quietly devastating disappointments that – unless we can actually experience them – will truly burden us.

When we were expected to be on holiday but were not, I kept sensing an urge 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 never felt better, just a bit blue. And then I would confront the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery involved frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a limited time window for an relaxing trip on the Belgian coast. So, no vacation. Just letdown and irritation, pain and care.

I know more serious issues can happen, it's merely a vacation, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I used that reasoning too. But what I wanted was to be honest with myself. In those moments when I was able to cease resisting the disappointment and we addressed it instead, it felt like we were sharing an experience. Instead of feeling depressed and trying to appear happy, I’ve given myself permission all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to anger and frustration and loathing and fury, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even turned out 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 witnessed in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could in some way erase our difficult moments, like clicking “undo”. But that arrow only points backwards. Acknowledging the reality that this is unattainable and embracing the grief and rage for things not turning out how we hoped, rather than a false optimism, can promote a transformation: from denial and depression, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be profoundly impactful.

We consider depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of dulling of all emotions, a suppressing of frustration and sorrow and letdown and happiness and vitality, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and release.

I have repeatedly found myself trapped in this urge to reverse things, but my little one is helping me to grow out of it. As a new mother, I was at times swamped by the incredible needs of my baby. Not only the nursing – sometimes for over an hour at a time, and then again under 60 minutes after that – and not only the diaper swaps, and then the doing it once more before you’ve even completed the task you were handling. These routine valuable duties among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a solace and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, unceasing and exhausting. What surprised me the most – aside from the sleep deprivation – were the emotional demands.

I had assumed my most primary duty as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. But I soon realized that it was unfeasible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her craving could seem insatiable; my nourishment could not arrive quickly, or it came too fast. And then we needed to change her – but she disliked being changed, and sobbed as if she were plunging into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed soothed by the hugs we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were separated from us, that no solution we provided could help.

I soon realized that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to endure, and then to help her digest the intense emotions triggered by the impossibility of my shielding her from all discomfort. As she enhanced her skill to consume and process milk, she also had to build an ability to manage her sentiments and her suffering 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) frustration, rage, despair, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to make things go well, but to support in creating understanding to her sentimental path of things not working out ideally.

This was the contrast, for her, between being with someone who was trying to give her only good feelings, and instead being helped to grow a capacity to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the distinction, for me, between desiring to experience wonderful about executing ideally as a perfect mother, and instead developing the capacity to tolerate my own shortcomings in order to do a good enough job – and comprehend my daughter’s letdown and frustration with me. The contrast between my trying to stop her crying, and understanding when she required to weep.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel reduced the desire to hit “undo” and change our narrative into one where things are ideal. I find faith in my sense of a ability evolving internally to understand that this is impossible, and to understand that, when I’m occupied with attempting to rebook a holiday, what I truly require is to sob.