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I trust your a good summer: I did not. That day we were scheduled to travel for leisure, 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 experience I learned something valuable, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to experience sadness when things take a turn. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more routine, quietly devastating disappointments that – if we don't actually feel them – will really weigh us down.

When we were expected to be on holiday but were not, I kept experiencing a pull 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 bump up against the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery necessitated frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a finite opportunity for an pleasant vacation on the Belgian coast. So, no holiday. Just discontent and annoyance, hurt and nurturing.

I know worse things can happen, it’s only a holiday, 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 cease resisting the disappointment and we addressed it instead, it felt like we were going through something together. Instead of experiencing sadness and trying to appear happy, I’ve given myself permission all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and loathing and fury, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even was feasible to enjoy our time at home together.

This reminded me of a hope I sometimes notice in my therapy clients, and that I have also seen in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could in some way undo our negative events, like pressing a reset button. But that button only points backwards. Confronting the reality that this is not possible and embracing the sorrow and anger for things not turning out how we expected, rather than a false optimism, can facilitate a change of current: from rejection and low mood, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it needs duration – this can be profoundly impactful.

We think of depression as experiencing negativity – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a suppressing of frustration and sorrow and frustration and delight and energy, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but acknowledging every sentiment, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and release.

I have frequently found myself stuck in this urge to erase events, but my young child is assisting me in moving past it. As a new mother, I was at times burdened by the amazing requirements of my infant. Not only the feeding – sometimes for over an hour at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the changing, and then the doing it once more before you’ve even finished the task you were changing. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – efficiency blended with affection – are a reassurance and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, unceasing and exhausting. What shocked me the most – aside from the sleep deprivation – were the emotional demands.

I had thought my most primary duty as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. But I soon realized that it was impossible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her appetite could seem unmeetable; my supply could not be produced rapidly, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to change her – but she hated being changed, and sobbed as if she were descending into a gloomy abyss of despair. And while sometimes she seemed consoled by the hugs we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were distant from us, that nothing we had to offer could help.

I soon realized that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to endure, and then to help her digest the overwhelming feelings provoked by the unattainability of my guarding her from all distress. As she enhanced her skill to ingest and absorb milk, she also had to build an ability to process her feelings and her suffering when the milk didn’t come, or when she was in pain, or any other hard and bewildering experience – and I had to evolve with 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 feelings journey of things not working out ideally.

This was the difference, for her, between experiencing someone who was seeking to offer her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being supported in building a capacity to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the difference, for me, between desiring to experience great about doing a perfect job as a ideal parent, and instead cultivating the skill to tolerate my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a good enough job – and grasp my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The difference between my attempting to halt her crying, and recognizing when she needed to cry.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel less keenly the wish to hit “undo” and rewrite our story into one where all is perfect. I find faith in my feeling of a ability growing inside me to understand that this is impossible, and to comprehend that, when I’m busy trying to rearrange a trip, what I actually want is to weep.