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I hope you had a enjoyable summer: mine was not. That day we were planning to go on holiday, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, expecting him to have urgent but routine surgery, which caused our getaway ideas had to be cancelled.

From this situation I learned something significant, all over again, about how hard it is for me to feel bad when things go wrong. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more common, quietly devastating disappointments that – without the ability to actually experience them – will significantly depress us.

When we were supposed to be on holiday but could not be, 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 didn't improve, just a bit down. And then I would face the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery involved frequent uncomfortable wound care, and there is a finite opportunity for an enjoyable break on the shores of Belgium. So, no holiday. Just letdown and irritation, suffering and attention.

I know more serious issues can happen, it's merely a vacation, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I tested that argument too. But what I wanted was to be sincere with my feelings. In those times 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 experiencing sadness and trying to smile, I’ve granted myself all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and aversion and wrath, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even became possible to appreciate our moments at home together.

This recalled of a wish I sometimes see in my therapy clients, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could somehow reverse our unwanted experiences, like hitting a reverse switch. But that option only points backwards. Facing the reality that this is impossible and accepting the grief and rage for things not happening how we anticipated, rather than a insincere positive spin, can enable a shift: from denial and depression, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – 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 rage and grief and disappointment and joy and energy, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and freedom.

I have often found myself stuck in this wish to click “undo”, but my little one is helping me to grow out of it. As a recent parent, I was at times swamped by the amazing requirements of my infant. Not only the nourishing – sometimes for over an hour at a time, and then again less than an hour after that – and not only the diaper swaps, and then the doing it once more before you’ve even finished the change you were changing. These everyday important activities among so many others – efficiency blended with affection – are a solace and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What shocked me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the emotional demands.

I had assumed my most key role as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. But I soon came to realise that it was not possible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her craving could seem unmeetable; my nourishment could not come fast enough, or it came too fast. And then we needed to change her – but she hated being changed, and wept as if she were plunging into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed consoled by the cuddles we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were distant from us, that no comfort we gave could help.

I soon discovered that my most important job as a mother was first to persevere, and then to assist her process the intense emotions provoked by the infeasibility of my guarding her from all discomfort. As she developed her capacity to consume and process milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to digest her emotions 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 grow through her (and my) frustration, rage, despair, hatred, disappointment, hunger. My job was not to make things go well, but to help bring meaning to her emotional experience of things being less than perfect.

This was the contrast, for her, between having someone who was seeking to offer her only good feelings, and instead being helped to grow a ability to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the contrast, for me, between aiming to have wonderful about performing flawlessly as a perfect mother, and instead developing the capacity to tolerate my own imperfections in order to do a adequately performed – and comprehend my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The distinction between my seeking to prevent her crying, and understanding when she required to weep.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel less keenly the urge to click erase and change our narrative into one where things are ideal. I find optimism in my awareness of a ability developing within to acknowledge that this is unattainable, and to realize that, when I’m focused on striving to reschedule a vacation, what I really need is to sob.