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I wish you enjoyed a good summer: my experience was different. On the day we were planning to take a vacation, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have urgent but routine surgery, which caused our getaway ideas were forced to be cancelled.

From this episode I realized a truth important, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to feel bad when things take a turn. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more common, subtly crushing disappointments that – if we don't actually feel them – will really weigh us down.

When we were meant to be on holiday but weren't, I kept feeling a tug 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 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 finite opportunity for an relaxing trip on the Belgian coast. So, no getaway. Just discontent and annoyance, suffering and attention.

I know more serious issues can happen, it’s only a holiday, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I tried that line too. But what I needed was to be sincere with my feelings. In those times when I was able to halt battling the disappointment and we addressed it instead, it felt like we were sharing an experience. Instead of experiencing sadness and trying to appear happy, I’ve given myself permission all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and aversion and wrath, which at least felt real. At times, it even became possible to value our days at home together.

This brought to mind of a wish I sometimes observe in my therapy clients, and that I have also experienced in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could somehow erase our difficult moments, like clicking “undo”. But that button only looks to the past. Acknowledging the reality that this is not possible and accepting the grief and rage for things not happening how we hoped, rather than a false optimism, can promote a transformation: from avoidance and sadness, to development and opportunity. Over time – and, of course, it needs duration – this can be life-changing.

We think of depression as experiencing negativity – but to my mind it’s a kind of deadening of all emotions, a pressing down of frustration and sorrow and letdown and happiness and energy, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but acknowledging every sentiment, a kind of honest emotional expression and release.

I have frequently found myself trapped in this desire to erase events, but my toddler is helping me to grow out of it. As a new mother, I was at times burdened by the amazing requirements of my infant. Not only the nourishing – sometimes for more than 60 minutes at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the diaper swaps, and then the repeating the process before you’ve even completed the swap you were doing. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a reassurance and a significant blessing. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What surprised me the most – aside from the sleep deprivation – were the emotional demands.

I had thought my most key role as a mother was to fulfill my infant's requirements. But I soon realized that it was unfeasible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her hunger could seem insatiable; my milk could not be produced rapidly, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to change her – but she hated being changed, and wept as if she were plunging into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed consoled by the cuddles we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were separated from us, that no comfort we gave could assist.

I soon realized that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to survive, and then to assist her process the powerful sentiments caused by the unattainability of my shielding her from all distress. As she grew her ability to ingest and absorb milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to digest her emotions and her distress when the nourishment was delayed, or when she was suffering, or any other challenging and perplexing experience – and I had to evolve with her (and my) irritation, anger, hopelessness, loathing, discontent, need. My job was not to guarantee smooth experiences, but to assist in finding significance to her emotional experience of things being less than perfect.

This was the difference, for her, between being with someone who was seeking to offer her only good feelings, and instead being supported in building a skill to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the distinction, for me, between desiring to experience great about doing a perfect job as a perfect mother, and instead developing the capacity to endure my own imperfections in order to do a sufficiently well – and grasp my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The difference between my trying to stop her crying, and comprehending when she needed to cry.

Now that we have developed beyond this together, I feel not as strongly the urge to press reverse and rewrite our story into one where things are ideal. I find optimism in my awareness of a capacity developing within to understand that this is impossible, and to realize that, when I’m busy trying to reschedule a vacation, what I really need is to weep.