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I trust your a pleasant summer: mine was not. On the day we were supposed to be go on holiday, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which resulted in our travel plans needed to be cancelled.

From this experience I gained insight important, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to experience sadness when things go wrong. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more common, quietly devastating disappointments that – without the ability to actually acknowledge them – will significantly depress us.

When we were supposed to be on holiday but weren't, 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 never felt better, just a bit depressed. And then I would confront the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery involved frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a short period for an pleasant vacation on the Belgian coast. So, no holiday. Just discontent and annoyance, pain and care.

I know worse things can happen, it's just a trip, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I tried that line too. But what I wanted was to be truthful to myself. In those times when I was able to cease resisting the disappointment and we addressed it instead, it felt like we were going through something together. Instead of feeling depressed and trying to smile, I’ve given myself permission all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and hatred and rage, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even was feasible to value our days at home together.

This reminded me of a desire I sometimes observe in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also experienced in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could perhaps reverse our unwanted experiences, like clicking “undo”. But that option only looks to the past. Confronting the reality that this is impossible and allowing the pain and fury for things not working out how we hoped, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can facilitate a change of current: from denial and depression, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be life-changing.

We view depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of dulling of all emotions, a repressing of anger and sadness and disappointment and joy and vitality, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but acknowledging every sentiment, a kind of honest emotional expression and freedom.

I have frequently found myself stuck in this wish to erase events, but my toddler 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 nourishing – sometimes for a lengthy period 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 handling. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – efficiency blended with affection – are a comfort and a tremendous privilege. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What astounded me the most – aside from the sleep deprivation – were the emotional demands.

I had believed my most primary duty as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. But I soon realized that it was not possible to meet all of my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her hunger could seem unmeetable; my supply could not come fast enough, or it came too fast. And then we needed to change her – but she despised being changed, and sobbed as if she were descending into a dark vortex of doom. 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 aid.

I soon discovered that my most important job as a mother was first to persevere, and then to help her digest the intense emotions triggered by the impossibility of my protecting her from all unease. As she grew her ability to consume and process milk, she also had to build an ability to digest her emotions and her suffering when the nourishment was delayed, or when she was in pain, or any other hard and bewildering experience – and I had to evolve with her (and my) frustration, rage, despair, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to make things go well, but to assist in finding significance to her emotional experience of things being less than perfect.

This was the contrast, for her, between experiencing someone who was seeking to offer her only good feelings, and instead being helped to grow a skill to feel every emotion. It was the difference, for me, between aiming to have wonderful about performing flawlessly as a ideal parent, and instead developing the capacity to tolerate my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a adequately performed – and grasp my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The difference between my attempting to halt her crying, and comprehending when she had to sob.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel not as strongly the urge to hit “undo” and alter our history into one where things are ideal. I find faith in my sense of a ability developing within to acknowledge that this is not possible, and to understand that, when I’m busy trying to rearrange a trip, what I actually want is to weep.