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I trust your a pleasant summer: my experience was different. The very day we were planning to take a vacation, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, expecting him to have urgent but routine surgery, which meant our travel plans were forced to be cancelled.

From this episode I gained insight important, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to experience sadness when things go wrong. I’m not talking about major catastrophes, but the more common, subtly crushing disappointments that – without the ability to actually feel them – will really weigh us down.

When we were meant to be on holiday but weren't, 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 never felt better, just a bit blue. And then I would face the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery involved frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a finite opportunity for an relaxing trip on the Belgium's beaches. So, no getaway. Just disappointment and frustration, hurt and nurturing.

I know graver situations can happen, it's merely a vacation, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I tried that line too. But what I needed was to be honest with myself. In those instances when I was able to halt battling the disappointment and we addressed it instead, it felt like we were sharing an experience. Instead of being down and trying to smile, I’ve given myself permission all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and hatred and rage, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even was feasible to value our days at home together.

This recalled of a desire I sometimes see in my therapy clients, and that I have also experienced in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could somehow erase our difficult moments, like clicking “undo”. But that arrow only goes in reverse. Confronting the reality that this is not possible and accepting the sorrow and anger for things not happening how we hoped, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can promote a transformation: from rejection and low mood, to development and opportunity. 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 numbing of all emotions, a pressing down of anger and sadness and frustration and delight and energy, and all the rest. The substitute for depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and release.

I have frequently found myself stuck in this desire to click “undo”, but my little one is assisting me in moving past it. As a recent parent, I was at times burdened by the amazing requirements of my baby. Not only the nourishing – sometimes for over an hour at a time, and then again under 60 minutes after that – and not only the outfit alterations, and then the repeating the process before you’ve even completed the change you were doing. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – efficiency blended with affection – are a solace and a significant blessing. Though they’re also, at moments, unceasing and exhausting. What surprised me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the emotional demands.

I had thought my most important job as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon came to realise that it was not possible to meet all of my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her craving could seem insatiable; my nourishment could not come fast enough, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to alter her clothes – but she despised being changed, and wept as if she were descending into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed comforted by the hugs we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were lost to us, that no solution we provided could aid.

I soon realized that my most crucial role as a mother was first to persevere, and then to assist her process the powerful sentiments caused by the infeasibility of my guarding her from all discomfort. As she grew her ability to consume and process milk, she also had to build an ability to process her feelings and her pain when the nourishment was delayed, or when she was in pain, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to develop alongside her (and my) frustration, rage, despair, hatred, disappointment, hunger. My job was not to ensure everything was perfect, but to support in creating understanding to her sentimental path of things not going so well.

This was the difference, for her, between being with someone who was trying to give her only positive emotions, and instead being assisted in developing a capacity to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the difference, for me, between aiming to have great about doing a perfect job as a ideal parent, and instead building the ability to tolerate my own imperfections in order to do a sufficiently well – and understand my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The contrast between my seeking to prevent her crying, and recognizing when she had to sob.

Now that we have developed beyond this together, I feel less keenly the desire to press reverse and rewrite our story into one where everything goes well. I find optimism in my sense of a ability developing within to understand that this is impossible, and to realize that, when I’m occupied with attempting to rearrange a trip, what I really need is to cry.