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I trust your a enjoyable summer: mine was not. The very day we were planning to take a vacation, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which resulted in our travel plans needed to be cancelled.

From this episode I realized a truth important, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to experience sadness when things go wrong. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more routine, quietly devastating disappointments that – if we don't actually feel them – will really weigh us down.

When we were meant 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 depressed. And then I would face the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery necessitated frequent uncomfortable wound care, and there is a short period for an enjoyable break on the Belgian coast. So, no holiday. Just letdown and irritation, pain and care.

I know more serious issues can happen, it’s only a holiday, what a privileged problem to have – I know because I used that reasoning too. But what I required was to be honest with myself. In those times when I was able to cease resisting the disappointment and we addressed it instead, it felt like we were going through something together. Instead of being down and trying to smile, I’ve granted myself all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and loathing and fury, which at least seemed authentic. At times, it even was feasible to value our days at home together.

This brought to mind of a hope I sometimes observe in my therapy clients, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could perhaps erase our difficult moments, like clicking “undo”. But that button only looks to the past. Confronting the reality that this is unattainable and embracing the sorrow and anger for things not working out how we expected, rather than a false optimism, can enable a shift: from rejection and low mood, to development and opportunity. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be life-changing.

We consider depression as experiencing negativity – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a repressing of anger and sadness and disappointment and joy and vitality, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and release.

I have frequently found myself caught 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 incredible needs of my newborn. Not only the feeding – 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 ended the swap you were handling. These everyday important activities among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a solace and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, persistent and tiring. 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 fulfill my infant's requirements. But I soon understood that it was not possible to meet all of my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her appetite could seem endless; my milk could not be produced rapidly, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she disliked being changed, and wept as if she were falling into a shadowy pit of misery. 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 assist.

I soon realized that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to persevere, and then to help her digest the powerful sentiments triggered by the impossibility of my shielding her from all unease. As she enhanced her skill to take in and digest 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) annoyance, fury, despondency, loathing, discontent, need. My job was not to ensure everything was perfect, but to support in creating understanding to her emotional experience of things not going so well.

This was the distinction, for her, between being with someone who was trying to give her only positive emotions, and instead being assisted in developing a skill to experience all feelings. It was the distinction, for me, between aiming to have wonderful about executing ideally as a ideal parent, and instead developing the capacity to tolerate my own imperfections in order to do a adequately performed – and understand my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The distinction between my attempting to halt her crying, and understanding when she required to weep.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel not as strongly the wish to click erase and rewrite our story into one where things are ideal. I find faith in my awareness of a skill developing within to recognise that this is not possible, and to comprehend that, when I’m busy trying to reschedule a vacation, what I truly require is to weep.