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I wish you enjoyed a pleasant summer: I did not. On the day we were supposed to be travel for leisure, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, expecting him to have prompt but common surgery, which caused our vacation arrangements were forced to be cancelled.

From this episode I learned something valuable, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to experience sadness when things take a turn. I’m not talking about major catastrophes, but the more common, gently heartbreaking 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 sensing an urge 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 blue. And then I would confront the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery required frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a short period for an relaxing trip on the Belgian coast. So, no holiday. Just discontent and annoyance, pain and care.

I know graver situations can happen, it's merely a vacation, 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 stop fighting off the disappointment and we talked about it instead, it felt like we were sharing an experience. Instead of being down and trying to smile, I’ve given myself permission all sorts of unpleasant emotions, including but not limited to anger and frustration and aversion and wrath, which at least felt real. At times, it even became possible to value our days at home together.

This recalled of a hope I sometimes see in my therapy clients, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could somehow erase our difficult moments, like clicking “undo”. But that arrow only looks to the past. Facing the reality that this is impossible and allowing the pain and fury for things not working out how we anticipated, rather than a false optimism, can promote a transformation: from rejection and low mood, to development and opportunity. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be profoundly impactful.

We consider depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of deadening of all emotions, a repressing of rage and grief and letdown and happiness and energy, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and release.

I have repeatedly found myself stuck in this urge to reverse things, but my toddler is supporting my evolution. As a first-time mom, I was at times swamped by the astonishing demands of my baby. Not only the nourishing – sometimes for more than 60 minutes at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the diaper swaps, and then the changing again before you’ve even finished the swap you were changing. These everyday important activities among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a solace and a significant blessing. Though they’re also, at moments, unceasing and exhausting. What astounded me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the emotional demands.

I had believed my most key role as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon understood that it was not possible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her appetite could seem insatiable; my nourishment could not arrive quickly, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to change her – but she disliked being changed, and sobbed as if she were plunging into a gloomy abyss of despair. And while sometimes she seemed consoled by the hugs we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were distant from us, that no solution we provided could help.

I soon discovered that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to persevere, and then to help her digest the overwhelming feelings provoked by the unattainability of my shielding her from all unease. As she developed her capacity to ingest and absorb milk, she also had to develop a capacity to process her feelings 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) annoyance, fury, despondency, loathing, discontent, need. My job was not to ensure everything was perfect, but to assist in finding significance to her emotional experience of things not working out ideally.

This was the distinction, for her, between experiencing someone who was attempting to provide her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being assisted in developing a skill to feel every emotion. It was the difference, for me, between wanting to feel excellent about doing a perfect job as a flawless caregiver, and instead building the ability to endure my own shortcomings in order to do a sufficiently well – and grasp my daughter’s letdown and frustration with me. The difference between my seeking to prevent her crying, and understanding when she needed to cry.

Now that we have developed beyond this together, I feel not as strongly the wish to click erase and change our narrative into one where all is perfect. I find optimism in my sense of a capacity evolving internally to acknowledge that this is impossible, and to comprehend that, when I’m focused on striving to rebook a holiday, what I actually want is to weep.