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I hope you had a good summer: I did not. The very day we were planning to go on holiday, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, expecting him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which meant our getaway ideas needed to be cancelled.

From this episode I gained insight significant, all over again, about how hard it is for me to experience sadness when things go wrong. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more common, subtly crushing disappointments that – without the ability to actually experience them – will truly burden us.

When we were meant to be on holiday but could not be, I kept experiencing a pull 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 remained low, just a bit blue. And then I would bump up against the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery necessitated frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a limited time window for an enjoyable break on the Belgium's beaches. So, no vacation. Just discontent and annoyance, hurt and nurturing.

I know worse things can happen, it's just a trip, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I tested that argument too. But what I wanted was to be truthful to myself. In those moments when I was able to halt battling the disappointment and we discussed it instead, it felt like we were going through something together. Instead of feeling depressed and trying to put on a brave face, I’ve granted myself all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and aversion and wrath, which at least seemed authentic. At times, it even became possible to appreciate our moments at home together.

This brought to mind of a hope I sometimes notice in my therapy clients, and that I have also experienced in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could in some way erase our difficult moments, like hitting a reverse switch. But that arrow only points backwards. Facing the reality that this is unattainable and embracing the grief and rage for things not working out how we expected, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can facilitate a change of current: from rejection and low mood, to development and opportunity. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be life-changing.

We think of depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of deadening of all emotions, a suppressing of anger and sadness and letdown and happiness and vitality, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but acknowledging every sentiment, a kind of honest emotional expression and liberty.

I have repeatedly found myself stuck in this desire to reverse things, but my young child is supporting my evolution. As a new mother, I was at times burdened by the incredible needs of my newborn. Not only the nourishing – sometimes for over an hour at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the outfit alterations, and then the repeating the process before you’ve even finished the change you were handling. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a comfort and a significant blessing. Though they’re also, at moments, unceasing and exhausting. What surprised me the most – aside from the sleep deprivation – were the feelings requirements.

I had thought my most key role as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. But I soon realized that it was impossible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her appetite could seem endless; my supply could not come fast enough, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she despised being changed, and sobbed as if she were descending into a gloomy abyss of despair. And while sometimes she seemed comforted by the embraces we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were lost to us, that no comfort we gave could aid.

I soon discovered that my most important job as a mother was first to persevere, and then to help her digest the powerful sentiments caused by the impossibility of my shielding her from all discomfort. As she grew her ability to ingest and absorb milk, she also had to build an ability to digest her emotions and her distress when the milk didn’t come, or when she was hurting, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) frustration, rage, despair, loathing, discontent, need. My job was not to make things go well, but to support in creating understanding to her emotional experience of things being less than perfect.

This was the difference, for her, between having someone who was attempting to provide her only positive emotions, and instead being assisted in developing a capacity to feel every emotion. It was the difference, for me, between aiming to have excellent about performing flawlessly as a perfect mother, and instead building the ability to endure 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 trying to stop her crying, and comprehending when she needed to cry.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel less keenly the urge to hit “undo” and rewrite our story into one where things are ideal. I find optimism in my feeling of a ability growing inside me to understand that this is not possible, and to comprehend that, when I’m focused on striving to reschedule a vacation, what I truly require is to weep.