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I trust your a good summer: my experience was different. The very day we were planning to travel for leisure, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which meant our getaway ideas needed to be cancelled.

From this situation I learned something important, 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 common, subtly crushing disappointments that – unless we can actually feel them – will significantly depress us.

When we were supposed to be on holiday but weren't, 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 never felt better, just a bit down. And then I would bump up against the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery required frequent uncomfortable wound care, and there is a finite opportunity for an enjoyable break on the Belgium's beaches. So, no vacation. Just letdown and irritation, hurt and nurturing.

I know more serious issues can happen, it's merely a vacation, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I tried that line too. But what I wanted was to be sincere with my feelings. In those moments when I was able to stop fighting off the disappointment and we addressed it instead, it felt like we were facing it as a team. Instead of feeling depressed and trying to smile, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and aversion and wrath, which at least seemed authentic. At times, it even was feasible to enjoy our time at home together.

This reminded me of a wish I sometimes observe in my therapy clients, and that I have also experienced in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could somehow erase our difficult moments, like hitting a reverse switch. But that arrow only points backwards. Confronting the reality that this is not possible and accepting the grief and rage for things not turning out how we anticipated, rather than a insincere positive spin, can facilitate a change of current: from denial and depression, to development and opportunity. Over time – and, of course, it needs duration – this can be profoundly impactful.

We think of depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of deadening of all emotions, a pressing down of rage and grief and frustration and delight and life force, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but acknowledging every sentiment, a kind of honest emotional expression and freedom.

I have frequently found myself stuck in this urge to reverse things, but my toddler is helping me to grow out of it. As a new mother, I was at times burdened by the incredible needs of my newborn. Not only the nursing – sometimes for over an hour at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the changing, and then the repeating the process before you’ve even ended 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 tremendous privilege. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What shocked me the most – aside from the sleep deprivation – were the emotional demands.

I had thought my most important job as a mother was to fulfill my infant's requirements. But I soon came to realise that it was impossible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her craving could seem insatiable; my nourishment could not come fast enough, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she hated being changed, and wept as if she were descending into a gloomy abyss of despair. And while sometimes she seemed consoled by the cuddles we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were lost to us, that no solution we provided could assist.

I soon learned that my most crucial role as a mother was first to endure, and then to assist her process the intense emotions triggered 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 build an ability to digest her emotions and her suffering when the milk didn’t come, or when she was in pain, or any other difficult and confusing 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 support in creating understanding to her emotional experience of things not working out ideally.

This was the contrast, for her, between experiencing someone who was attempting to provide her only good feelings, and instead being assisted in developing a capacity to experience all feelings. It was the contrast, for me, between aiming to have great about executing ideally as a ideal parent, and instead developing the capacity to accept my own shortcomings in order to do a sufficiently well – and comprehend my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The contrast between my trying to stop her crying, and recognizing when she had to sob.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel not as strongly the urge to hit “undo” and rewrite our story into one where everything goes well. I find faith in my sense of a capacity growing inside me to acknowledge that this is unattainable, and to understand that, when I’m busy trying to rearrange a trip, what I truly require is to weep.