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I trust your a pleasant summer: I did not. That day we were scheduled to take a vacation, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which caused our getaway ideas were forced 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 don't work out. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more common, subtly crushing disappointments that – if we don't actually feel them – will truly burden us.

When we were expected to be on holiday but were not, 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 depressed. And then I would bump up against the reality that this holiday had truly vanished: my husband’s surgery required frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a short period for an pleasant vacation on the Belgian coast. So, no vacation. Just disappointment and frustration, pain and care.

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 needed was to be sincere with my feelings. In those moments when I was able to halt battling the disappointment and we talked about it instead, it felt like we were going through something together. Instead of experiencing sadness and trying to put on a brave face, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of unpleasant emotions, including but not limited to anger and frustration and loathing and fury, which at least felt real. At times, it even became possible to enjoy our time at home together.

This reminded me of a desire I sometimes notice in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also experienced in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could in some way reverse our unwanted experiences, like pressing a reset button. But that arrow only points backwards. Facing the reality that this is not possible and allowing the pain and fury for things not happening how we anticipated, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can enable a shift: 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 being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of deadening of all emotions, a suppressing of frustration and sorrow and disappointment and joy and energy, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of honest emotional expression and freedom.

I have repeatedly found myself trapped in this desire to erase events, but my toddler is assisting me in moving past it. As a first-time mom, I was at times swamped by the incredible needs of my newborn. Not only the nursing – sometimes for more than 60 minutes at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the outfit alterations, and then the changing again before you’ve even completed the change you were doing. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a reassurance and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, persistent and tiring. What astounded me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the emotional demands.

I had believed my most important job as a mother was to fulfill my infant's requirements. But I soon realized that it was not possible to meet all of my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her craving could seem endless; my supply could not be produced rapidly, or it came too fast. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she despised being changed, and sobbed as if she were falling into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed consoled by the hugs we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were lost to us, that nothing we had to offer could assist.

I soon realized that my most important job as a mother was first to persevere, and then to support her in managing the powerful sentiments provoked by the impossibility of my protecting her from all unease. As she enhanced her skill to ingest and absorb milk, she also had to build an ability to manage her sentiments and her distress when the milk didn’t come, or when she was suffering, or any other challenging and perplexing experience – and I had to develop alongside her (and my) frustration, rage, despair, hatred, disappointment, hunger. My job was not to guarantee smooth experiences, but to assist in finding significance to her emotional experience of things not going so well.

This was the contrast, for her, between having someone who was seeking to offer her only positive emotions, and instead being supported in building a ability to feel every emotion. It was the difference, for me, between aiming to have wonderful about doing a perfect job as a perfect mother, and instead developing the capacity to tolerate my own shortcomings in order to do a sufficiently well – and grasp my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The difference between my attempting to halt her crying, and understanding when she needed to cry.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel not as strongly the urge to click erase and alter our history into one where all is perfect. I find hope in my feeling of a capacity evolving internally to recognise that this is impossible, and to comprehend that, when I’m focused on striving to rearrange a trip, what I actually want is to cry.