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I wish you enjoyed a pleasant summer: I did not. The very day we were scheduled to travel for leisure, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, expecting him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which resulted in our vacation arrangements needed 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 routine, quietly devastating disappointments that – without the ability to actually experience them – will really weigh us down.

When we were meant to be on holiday but were not, I kept sensing an urge 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 depressed. 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 short period for an pleasant vacation on the Belgium's beaches. So, no vacation. Just discontent and annoyance, pain and care.

I know worse things can happen, it's merely a vacation, such a fortunate concern to have – I know because I tried that line too. But what I needed was to be truthful to myself. In those times when I was able to halt battling the disappointment and we discussed it instead, it felt like we were sharing an experience. Instead of experiencing sadness and trying to put on a brave face, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of unpleasant emotions, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and loathing and fury, which at least felt real. At times, it even became possible to value our days at home together.

This reminded me of a wish I sometimes see in my counseling individuals, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could somehow erase our difficult moments, like pressing a reset button. But that option only points backwards. Confronting the reality that this is not possible and embracing the sorrow and anger for things not turning out how we hoped, rather than a insincere positive spin, can facilitate a change of current: from rejection and low mood, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be life-changing.

We view 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 life force, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but acknowledging every sentiment, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and liberty.

I have repeatedly found myself trapped in this desire to reverse things, but my little one is supporting my evolution. As a recent parent, I was at times burdened by the amazing requirements of my infant. Not only the nursing – sometimes for more than 60 minutes at a time, and then again less than an hour after that – and not only the outfit alterations, and then the doing it once more before you’ve even finished the change you were changing. These routine valuable duties 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 psychological needs.

I had believed my most important job as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon understood that it was not possible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her hunger 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 plunging into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed comforted by the embraces we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were lost to us, that nothing we had to offer could aid.

I soon realized that my most crucial role as a mother was first to survive, and then to support her in managing the powerful sentiments triggered by the unattainability of my shielding her from all discomfort. As she enhanced her skill to consume and process milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to process her feelings and her suffering when the supply was insufficient, or when she was hurting, or any other challenging and perplexing experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) irritation, anger, hopelessness, hatred, disappointment, hunger. My job was not to make things go well, but to assist in finding significance to her emotional experience of things not working out ideally.

This was the contrast, for her, between experiencing someone who was seeking to offer her only positive emotions, and instead being assisted in developing a capacity to feel every emotion. It was the contrast, for me, between wanting to feel excellent about doing a perfect job as a flawless caregiver, and instead building the ability to accept my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a sufficiently well – and understand my daughter’s letdown and frustration with me. The contrast between my trying to stop her crying, and comprehending when she required to weep.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel reduced the wish to press reverse and change our narrative into one where everything goes well. I find optimism in my awareness of a skill developing within to recognise that this is not possible, and to realize that, when I’m focused on striving to rebook a holiday, what I truly require is to cry.