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I wish you enjoyed a enjoyable summer: I did not. On the day we were scheduled to take a vacation, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which resulted in our travel plans had to be cancelled.

From this situation I gained insight important, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to experience sadness when things take a turn. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more common, quietly devastating disappointments that – unless we can actually experience them – will truly burden us.

When we were meant to be on holiday but weren't, I kept sensing an urge 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 remained low, just a bit down. And then I would face the reality that this holiday had truly vanished: my husband’s surgery involved frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a short period for an enjoyable break on the Belgium's beaches. So, no holiday. Just discontent and annoyance, suffering and attention.

I know graver situations can happen, it’s only a holiday, such a fortunate concern to have – I know because I tried that line too. But what I wanted was to be sincere with my feelings. In those instances when I was able to halt battling the disappointment and we discussed it instead, it felt like we were facing it as a team. Instead of experiencing sadness and trying to appear happy, I’ve granted myself all sorts of unpleasant emotions, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and aversion and wrath, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even became possible to enjoy our time at home together.

This recalled of a desire I sometimes see in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could somehow reverse our unwanted experiences, like hitting a reverse switch. But that arrow only points backwards. Facing the reality that this is unattainable and embracing the pain and fury for things not working out how we expected, rather than a insincere positive spin, can promote a transformation: 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 being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of deadening of all emotions, a suppressing of anger and sadness and disappointment and joy and life force, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and release.

I have repeatedly found myself stuck in this desire to reverse things, but my young child is supporting my evolution. As a first-time mom, I was at times overwhelmed by the astonishing demands of my baby. Not only the nourishing – sometimes for over an hour at a time, and then again less than an hour after that – and not only the outfit alterations, and then the changing again before you’ve even finished the task you were handling. These routine valuable duties among so many others – efficiency blended with affection – are a reassurance and a tremendous privilege. Though they’re also, at moments, persistent and tiring. What surprised me the most – aside from the sleep deprivation – were the feelings requirements.

I had believed my most important job as a mother was to fulfill my infant's requirements. But I soon understood that it was not possible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her appetite could seem insatiable; my nourishment could not arrive quickly, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to change her – but she despised being changed, and wept as if she were falling into a shadowy pit of misery. And while sometimes she seemed consoled by the hugs we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were separated from us, that nothing we had to offer could assist.

I soon discovered that my most crucial role as a mother was first to endure, and then to help her digest the intense emotions caused by the infeasibility of my protecting her from all discomfort. As she developed her capacity to consume and process milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to digest her emotions and her distress when the nourishment was delayed, or when she was in pain, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) annoyance, fury, despondency, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to ensure everything was perfect, but to support in creating understanding to her feelings journey of things being less than perfect.

This was the difference, for her, between experiencing someone who was attempting to provide her only positive emotions, and instead being assisted in developing a capacity to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the difference, for me, between aiming to have excellent about doing a perfect job as a flawless caregiver, and instead building the ability to tolerate my own shortcomings in order to do a good enough job – and grasp my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The difference between my seeking to prevent her crying, and understanding when she needed to cry.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel not as strongly the wish to press reverse and rewrite our story into one where everything goes well. I find hope in my feeling of a capacity growing inside me to recognise that this is unattainable, and to realize that, when I’m focused on striving to reschedule a vacation, what I truly require is to weep.