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I wish you enjoyed a good summer: my experience was different. On the day we were supposed to be travel for leisure, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which resulted in our vacation arrangements were forced to be cancelled.

From this experience I learned something important, all over again, about how hard it is for me to feel bad when things go wrong. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more routine, quietly devastating disappointments that – unless we can actually feel them – will truly burden us.

When we were supposed to be on holiday but weren't, 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 didn't improve, just a bit depressed. And then I would bump up against the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery required frequent uncomfortable wound care, and there is a finite opportunity for an enjoyable break on the shores of Belgium. So, no holiday. Just discontent and annoyance, suffering and attention.

I know worse things can happen, it's merely a vacation, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I used that reasoning too. But what I required was to be truthful to myself. 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 feeling depressed and trying to put on a brave face, I’ve given myself permission all sorts of unpleasant emotions, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and hatred and rage, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even became possible to appreciate our moments at home together.

This recalled of a hope I sometimes see in my therapy clients, and that I have also experienced in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could perhaps undo our negative events, like pressing a reset button. But that arrow only looks to the past. Facing the reality that this is not possible and accepting the grief and rage for things not turning out how we anticipated, rather than a insincere positive spin, can promote a transformation: from rejection and low mood, to progress and potential. 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 repressing of frustration and sorrow and disappointment and joy and vitality, and all the rest. The substitute for depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and liberty.

I have often found myself trapped in this urge to click “undo”, but my little one is assisting me in moving past it. As a recent parent, I was at times burdened by the astonishing demands of my infant. Not only the feeding – sometimes for a lengthy period at a time, and then again under 60 minutes after that – and not only the diaper swaps, and then the doing it once more before you’ve even completed the change you were handling. These everyday important activities among so many others – efficiency blended with affection – are a reassurance and a tremendous privilege. Though they’re also, at moments, unceasing and exhausting. What astounded me the most – aside from the sleep deprivation – were the feelings requirements.

I had thought my most primary duty as a mother was to fulfill my infant's requirements. But I soon understood that it was not possible to meet all of my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her craving could seem insatiable; my supply could not be produced rapidly, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she hated being changed, and wept as if she were plunging 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 distant from us, that no solution we provided could assist.

I soon realized that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to persevere, and then to support her in managing the intense emotions triggered by the infeasibility of my guarding her from all unease. As she enhanced her skill to consume and process milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to manage her sentiments and her pain when the supply was insufficient, or when she was hurting, or any other hard and bewildering experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) irritation, anger, hopelessness, 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 contrast, for her, between experiencing someone who was trying to give her only positive emotions, and instead being supported in building a capacity to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the difference, for me, between wanting to feel excellent about executing ideally as a perfect mother, and instead developing the capacity to tolerate my own shortcomings in order to do a adequately performed – and grasp my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The contrast between my trying to stop her crying, and understanding when she had to sob.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel not as strongly the urge to press reverse and alter our history into one where everything goes well. I find faith in my sense of a capacity evolving internally to acknowledge that this is unattainable, and to comprehend that, when I’m occupied with attempting to rearrange a trip, what I really need is to cry.