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I trust your a pleasant summer: mine was not. That day we were planning to go on holiday, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have urgent but routine surgery, which caused our vacation arrangements were forced to be cancelled.

From this situation I learned something important, all over again, about how hard it is for me to experience sadness when things take a turn. I’m not talking about major catastrophes, but the more everyday, subtly crushing disappointments that – without the ability to actually experience them – will significantly depress us.

When we were expected 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 never felt better, just a bit blue. And then I would face the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery necessitated frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a limited time window for an relaxing trip on the Belgian coast. So, no getaway. Just disappointment and frustration, pain and care.

I know worse things can happen, it's merely a vacation, what a privileged problem to have – I know because I tried that line too. But what I required was to be truthful to myself. In those instances when I was able to cease resisting the disappointment and we talked about it instead, it felt like we were sharing an experience. Instead of being down and trying to appear happy, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to anger and frustration and hatred and rage, which at least felt real. At times, it even became possible to enjoy our time at home together.

This brought to mind of a wish I sometimes see in my therapy clients, and that I have also seen in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could perhaps reverse our unwanted experiences, like hitting a reverse switch. But that option only points backwards. Facing the reality that this is not possible and accepting the grief and rage for things not turning out how we expected, rather than a insincere positive spin, can facilitate a change of current: from rejection and low mood, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – 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 disappointment and joy and vitality, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and liberty.

I have often found myself caught in this desire to reverse things, but my young child is helping me to grow out of it. As a recent parent, I was at times overwhelmed by the incredible needs of my infant. Not only the feeding – 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 swap you were doing. These routine valuable duties among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a comfort and a great honor. 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 believed my most key role as a mother was to fulfill my infant's requirements. But I soon understood that it was unfeasible to meet all of my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her craving could seem unmeetable; my nourishment could not be produced rapidly, or it came too fast. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she disliked being changed, and wept as if she were falling into a gloomy abyss of despair. And while sometimes she seemed comforted by the hugs we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were distant from us, that no comfort we gave could aid.

I soon learned that my most important job as a mother was first to persevere, and then to help her digest the powerful sentiments triggered by the unattainability of my protecting her from all distress. As she enhanced her skill to ingest and absorb milk, she also had to develop a capacity to process her feelings and her suffering when the milk didn’t come, or when she was in pain, 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 ensure everything was perfect, but to support in creating understanding to her emotional experience of things being less than perfect.

This was the distinction, for her, between experiencing someone who was attempting to provide her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being helped to grow a skill to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the distinction, for me, between wanting to feel wonderful about doing a perfect job as a flawless caregiver, and instead cultivating the skill to endure my own imperfections in order to do a sufficiently well – and grasp my daughter’s letdown and frustration with me. The contrast between my seeking to prevent her crying, and recognizing when she required to weep.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel not as strongly the urge to hit “undo” and rewrite our story into one where things are ideal. I find faith in my awareness of a skill evolving internally to understand that this is unattainable, and to comprehend that, when I’m occupied with attempting to reschedule a vacation, what I actually want is to sob.