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I wish you enjoyed a good summer: mine was not. That day we were planning to take a vacation, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have urgent but routine surgery, which resulted in our vacation arrangements had to be cancelled.

From this episode I gained insight significant, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to experience sadness when things take a turn. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more everyday, quietly devastating disappointments that – unless we can actually feel them – will truly burden us.

When we were expected to be on holiday but were not, 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 blue. And then I would bump up against the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery involved frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a finite opportunity for an pleasant vacation on the Belgium's beaches. So, no getaway. Just discontent and annoyance, suffering and attention.

I know graver situations can happen, it's merely a vacation, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I used that reasoning too. But what I needed was to be honest with myself. In those instances when I was able to stop fighting off the disappointment and we talked about it instead, it felt like we were facing it as a team. Instead of feeling depressed and trying to appear happy, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of unpleasant emotions, including but not limited to anger and frustration and loathing and fury, which at least seemed authentic. At times, it even became possible to value our days at home together.

This reminded me of a desire I sometimes notice in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also experienced in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could in some way reverse our unwanted experiences, like hitting a reverse switch. But that arrow only points backwards. Facing the reality that this is unattainable and accepting the pain and fury for things not happening how we hoped, rather than a false optimism, can enable a shift: from rejection and low mood, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be transformative.

We think of depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of dulling of all emotions, a suppressing of frustration and sorrow 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 genuine feeling freedom and liberty.

I have repeatedly found myself stuck in this urge to click “undo”, but my toddler is assisting me in moving past it. As a first-time mom, I was at times burdened by the amazing requirements of my newborn. Not only the nourishing – sometimes for over an hour at a time, and then again under 60 minutes after that – and not only the changing, and then the changing again before you’ve even completed the change you were handling. These routine valuable duties among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a comfort and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What astounded me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the psychological needs.

I had assumed my most important job as a mother was to fulfill my infant's requirements. But I soon came to realise that it was not possible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her craving could seem endless; my milk could not be produced rapidly, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to change her – but she disliked being changed, and cried 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 comfort we gave could assist.

I soon learned that my most important job as a mother was first to survive, and then to assist her process the overwhelming feelings provoked by the unattainability of my guarding her from all discomfort. As she grew her ability to take in and digest milk, she also had to build an ability to manage her sentiments and her pain when the supply was insufficient, or when she was in pain, or any other hard and bewildering experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) irritation, anger, hopelessness, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to ensure everything was perfect, but to assist in finding significance to her emotional experience of things not going so well.

This was the contrast, for her, between having someone who was attempting to provide her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being assisted in developing a skill to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the contrast, for me, between wanting to feel excellent about doing a perfect job as a perfect mother, and instead building the ability to accept my own imperfections in order to do a good enough job – and grasp my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The contrast between my attempting to halt her crying, and comprehending when she needed to cry.

Now that we have developed beyond this together, I feel reduced the urge to press reverse and change our narrative into one where things are ideal. I find hope in my feeling of a skill evolving internally to acknowledge that this is impossible, and to realize that, when I’m occupied with attempting to reschedule a vacation, what I actually want is to cry.