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I wish you enjoyed a good summer: I did not. The very day we were scheduled to take a vacation, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have urgent but routine surgery, which meant our travel plans had 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 major catastrophes, but the more everyday, quietly devastating disappointments that – without the ability to actually feel them – will significantly depress us.

When we were meant to be on holiday but weren't, I kept sensing an urge towards seeking optimism: “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 didn't improve, just a bit blue. And then I would bump up against the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery required frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a finite opportunity for an pleasant vacation on the shores of Belgium. So, no vacation. Just letdown and irritation, hurt and nurturing.

I know worse things can happen, it's just a trip, such a fortunate concern to have – I know because I used that reasoning too. But what I needed was to be honest with myself. In those times when I was able to stop fighting off the disappointment and we talked about it instead, it felt like we were facing it as a team. Instead of experiencing sadness and trying to smile, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and aversion and wrath, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even was feasible to enjoy our time at home together.

This recalled of a hope I sometimes observe in my therapy clients, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could somehow reverse our unwanted experiences, like pressing a reset button. But that button only goes in reverse. Facing the reality that this is unattainable and allowing the grief and rage for things not turning out how we expected, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can promote a transformation: from rejection and low mood, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be profoundly impactful.

We view depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of dulling of all emotions, a repressing of frustration and sorrow and letdown and happiness and energy, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of honest emotional expression and freedom.

I have often found myself caught in this urge to erase events, but my young child is helping me to grow out of it. As a recent parent, I was at times overwhelmed by the astonishing demands of my newborn. Not only the feeding – sometimes for more than 60 minutes at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the changing, and then the changing again before you’ve even completed the swap you were changing. These routine valuable duties among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a comfort and a significant blessing. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What shocked me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the feelings requirements.

I had believed my most primary duty as a mother was to fulfill my infant's requirements. But I soon understood that it was not possible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her appetite could seem endless; my nourishment could not arrive quickly, or it came too fast. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she hated being changed, and wept as if she were plunging into a gloomy abyss of despair. And while sometimes she seemed comforted by the cuddles we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were lost to us, that no solution we provided could help.

I soon realized that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to persevere, and then to assist her process the powerful sentiments provoked by the infeasibility of my protecting her from all distress. As she developed her capacity to consume and process milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to digest her emotions and her suffering when the supply was insufficient, or when she was hurting, or any other hard and bewildering experience – and I had to evolve with her (and my) irritation, anger, hopelessness, loathing, discontent, need. My job was not to make things go well, but to help bring meaning to her emotional experience of things being less than perfect.

This was the contrast, for her, between experiencing someone who was attempting to provide her only good feelings, and instead being supported in building a skill to experience all feelings. It was the distinction, for me, between wanting to feel great about executing ideally as a ideal parent, and instead developing the capacity to accept my own imperfections in order to do a sufficiently well – and comprehend my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The contrast between my attempting to halt her crying, and comprehending when she required to weep.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel not as strongly the wish to click erase and change our narrative into one where all is perfect. I find faith in my awareness of a capacity growing inside me to recognise that this is impossible, and to realize that, when I’m busy trying to reschedule a vacation, what I actually want is to sob.