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I wish you enjoyed a good summer: my experience was different. On the day we were scheduled to take a vacation, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have urgent but routine surgery, which meant our vacation arrangements were forced to be cancelled.

From this experience I learned something valuable, 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 everyday, gently heartbreaking disappointments that – unless we can actually experience them – will significantly depress us.

When we were expected to be on holiday but were not, I kept sensing an urge towards finding the positive: “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 down. And then I would face the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery involved frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a limited time window for an relaxing trip on the Belgian coast. So, no vacation. Just disappointment and frustration, hurt and nurturing.

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 halt battling the disappointment and we discussed it instead, it felt like we were going through something together. Instead of feeling depressed and trying to put on a brave face, I’ve given myself permission all sorts of unpleasant emotions, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and loathing and fury, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even was feasible to appreciate our moments at home together.

This recalled of a wish I sometimes notice in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could perhaps reverse our unwanted experiences, like clicking “undo”. But that arrow only points backwards. Confronting the reality that this is not possible and accepting the pain and fury for things not working out how we expected, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can enable a shift: from denial and depression, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it needs duration – this can be life-changing.

We view depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of dulling of all emotions, a suppressing 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 truthful emotional spontaneity and liberty.

I have frequently found myself caught in this wish to click “undo”, but my little one is helping me to grow out of it. As a new mother, I was at times burdened by the amazing requirements of my infant. Not only the nursing – sometimes for a lengthy period at a time, and then again under 60 minutes after that – and not only the changing, and then the repeating the process before you’ve even completed the change you were changing. These routine valuable duties among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a comfort and a significant blessing. Though they’re also, at moments, unceasing and exhausting. What astounded me the most – aside from the sleep deprivation – were the feelings requirements.

I had assumed my most key role as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. But I soon realized that it was not possible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her appetite could seem insatiable; my supply could not be produced rapidly, or it came too fast. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she hated being changed, and sobbed as if she were falling into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed soothed by the cuddles we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were lost to us, that no comfort we gave could help.

I soon learned that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to survive, and then to support her in managing the overwhelming feelings triggered by the unattainability of my shielding her from all discomfort. As she grew her ability to consume and process milk, she also had to build an ability to digest her emotions and her distress when the supply was insufficient, or when she was hurting, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to evolve with her (and my) frustration, rage, despair, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to guarantee smooth experiences, but to support in creating understanding 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 positive emotions, and instead being assisted in developing a capacity to experience all feelings. It was the distinction, for me, between aiming to have excellent about executing ideally as a flawless caregiver, and instead building the ability to tolerate my own shortcomings in order to do a adequately performed – and comprehend my daughter’s letdown and frustration with me. The contrast between my trying to stop her crying, and comprehending when she needed to cry.

Now that we have developed beyond this together, I feel less keenly the urge to hit “undo” and change our narrative into one where all is perfect. I find hope in my awareness of a skill evolving internally to recognise that this is unattainable, and to comprehend that, when I’m focused on striving to reschedule a vacation, what I really need is to cry.