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I wish you enjoyed a enjoyable summer: my experience was different. That day we were planning to go on holiday, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have urgent but routine surgery, which meant our vacation arrangements needed to be cancelled.

From this situation I realized a truth significant, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to feel bad when things don't work out. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more routine, gently heartbreaking disappointments that – unless we can actually acknowledge them – will really weigh us down.

When we were supposed to be on holiday but were not, 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 didn't improve, just a bit depressed. And then I would face the reality that this holiday had truly vanished: my husband’s surgery necessitated frequent uncomfortable wound care, and there is a finite opportunity for an relaxing trip on the Belgian coast. So, no getaway. Just disappointment and frustration, hurt and nurturing.

I know more serious issues can happen, it's merely a vacation, such a fortunate concern to have – I know because I tried that line too. But what I required was to be honest with myself. In those instances when I was able to stop fighting off the disappointment and we talked about it instead, it felt like we were going through something together. Instead of feeling depressed and trying to appear happy, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and hatred and rage, which at least felt real. At times, it even became possible to appreciate our moments at home together.

This recalled of a desire I sometimes notice in my therapy clients, and that I have also experienced in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could perhaps erase our difficult moments, like hitting a reverse switch. But that option only goes in reverse. Acknowledging the reality that this is unattainable and allowing the sorrow and anger for things not turning out how we anticipated, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can enable a shift: from rejection and low mood, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be life-changing.

We think of depression as experiencing negativity – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a repressing of anger and sadness and frustration and delight and vitality, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and liberty.

I have often found myself stuck in this urge to reverse things, but my toddler is assisting me in moving past it. As a new mother, I was at times swamped by the amazing requirements of my baby. Not only the nursing – sometimes for over an hour at a time, and then again less than an hour after that – and not only the diaper swaps, and then the changing again before you’ve even finished the swap you were changing. These routine valuable duties among so many others – efficiency blended with affection – are a reassurance and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What shocked me the most – aside from the sleep deprivation – were the feelings requirements.

I had assumed my most important job as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. But I soon came to realise that it was impossible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her hunger could seem unmeetable; my nourishment could not come fast enough, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to alter her clothes – but she hated being changed, and sobbed as if she were descending into a shadowy pit of misery. 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 discovered that my most important job as a mother was first to survive, and then to support her in managing the powerful sentiments triggered by the impossibility of my protecting her from all discomfort. As she grew her ability to take in and digest milk, she also had to build an ability to digest her emotions and her pain when the milk didn’t come, or when she was suffering, or any other hard and bewildering experience – and I had to develop alongside her (and my) frustration, rage, despair, hatred, disappointment, hunger. My job was not to make things go well, but to support in creating understanding to her sentimental path of things not working out ideally.

This was the contrast, for her, between having someone who was seeking to offer her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being supported in building a ability to feel every emotion. It was the contrast, for me, between desiring to experience great about performing flawlessly as a perfect mother, and instead cultivating the skill to endure my own imperfections in order to do a adequately performed – and comprehend 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 rewrite our story into one where all is perfect. I find optimism in my sense of a capacity developing within to recognise that this is not possible, and to comprehend that, when I’m focused on striving to reschedule a vacation, what I really need is to sob.