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I trust your a pleasant summer: I did not. The very day we were supposed to be go on holiday, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which meant our getaway ideas needed to be cancelled.

From this situation I realized a truth valuable, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to feel bad when things take a turn. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more routine, subtly crushing disappointments that – unless we can actually feel them – will really weigh us down.

When we were expected to be on holiday but weren't, I kept experiencing a pull 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 remained low, just a bit blue. And then I would face the reality that this holiday had truly vanished: my husband’s surgery required frequent uncomfortable wound care, and there is a short period for an relaxing trip on the Belgian coast. So, no getaway. Just discontent and annoyance, pain and care.

I know worse things can happen, it’s only a holiday, what a privileged problem to have – I know because I tried that line too. But what I wanted was to be sincere with my feelings. In those moments when I was able to stop fighting off the disappointment and we addressed it instead, it felt like we were sharing an experience. Instead of being down and trying to appear happy, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of unpleasant emotions, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and loathing and fury, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even turned out to appreciate our moments at home together.

This brought to mind of a wish I sometimes notice in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also experienced in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could perhaps undo our negative events, like hitting a reverse switch. But that option only looks to the past. Confronting the reality that this is impossible and embracing 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 progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be transformative.

We think of depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a pressing down of anger and sadness and disappointment and joy and vitality, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and freedom.

I have often found myself caught in this desire to reverse things, but my young child is supporting my evolution. As a new mother, I was at times swamped by the incredible needs of my baby. Not only the nourishing – sometimes for a lengthy period at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the changing, and then the repeating the process before you’ve even ended the change you were doing. These routine valuable duties among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a comfort and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, persistent and tiring. What astounded me the most – aside from the sleep deprivation – were the emotional demands.

I had assumed my most important job as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. But I soon understood that it was impossible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her craving could seem insatiable; my nourishment could not be produced rapidly, or it came too fast. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she despised being changed, and cried as if she were falling into a gloomy abyss of despair. And while sometimes she seemed soothed by the hugs we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were lost to us, that no solution we provided could help.

I soon learned that my most crucial role as a mother was first to persevere, and then to support her in managing the powerful sentiments triggered by the impossibility 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 process her feelings and her distress when the nourishment was delayed, or when she was suffering, or any other challenging and perplexing experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) annoyance, fury, despondency, 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 difference, for her, between experiencing someone who was trying to give her only positive emotions, and instead being helped to grow a skill to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the contrast, for me, between desiring to experience great about executing ideally as a flawless caregiver, and instead building the ability to accept my own imperfections in order to do a adequately performed – and understand my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The difference between my seeking to prevent her crying, and understanding when she required to weep.

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 awareness of a capacity evolving internally to understand that this is not possible, and to comprehend that, when I’m occupied with attempting to rearrange a trip, what I actually want is to sob.