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I wish you enjoyed a pleasant summer: my experience was different. On the day we were planning to go on holiday, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have prompt but common surgery, which caused our vacation arrangements had to be cancelled.

From this situation I learned something significant, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to feel bad when things take a turn. I’m not talking about major catastrophes, but the more everyday, quietly devastating disappointments that – without the ability to actually feel them – will really weigh us down.

When we were supposed to be on holiday but were not, I kept experiencing a pull towards seeking optimism: “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 confront the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery involved frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a finite opportunity for an relaxing trip on the Belgium's beaches. So, no holiday. Just letdown and irritation, suffering and attention.

I know more serious issues can happen, it's just a trip, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I used that reasoning 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 going through something together. Instead of being down and trying to smile, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of unpleasant emotions, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and aversion and wrath, which at least felt real. At times, it even turned out to appreciate our moments at home together.

This recalled of a hope I sometimes see in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also seen in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could somehow undo our negative events, like pressing a reset button. But that option only looks to the past. Acknowledging the reality that this is unattainable and allowing the grief and rage for things not working out how we hoped, rather than a false optimism, can enable a shift: from denial and depression, to growth and possibility. 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 deadening of all emotions, a suppressing of anger and sadness and letdown and happiness and energy, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of honest emotional expression and release.

I have repeatedly found myself caught in this urge to click “undo”, but my little one is helping me to grow out of it. As a first-time mom, I was at times burdened by the amazing requirements of my newborn. Not only the feeding – sometimes for over an hour 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 completed the swap you were changing. 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, relentless and draining. What astounded me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the psychological needs.

I had believed my most primary duty 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 needed it. Her appetite could seem insatiable; my supply could not arrive quickly, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she disliked being changed, and cried as if she were plunging into a shadowy pit of misery. And while sometimes she seemed consoled by the hugs we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were separated from us, that no solution we provided could aid.

I soon learned that my most important job as a mother was first to survive, and then to help her digest the intense emotions triggered by the unattainability of my protecting her from all distress. As she enhanced her skill to consume and process milk, she also had to build an ability to manage her sentiments and her distress when the nourishment was delayed, or when she was in pain, or any other hard and bewildering experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) annoyance, fury, despondency, hatred, disappointment, hunger. My job was not to make things go well, but to support in creating understanding to her sentimental path of things being less than perfect.

This was the distinction, for her, between experiencing someone who was trying to give her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being assisted in developing a capacity to feel every emotion. It was the difference, for me, between wanting to feel wonderful about executing ideally as a flawless caregiver, and instead cultivating the skill to tolerate my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a good enough job – and comprehend my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The distinction between my trying to stop her crying, and recognizing when she had to sob.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel not as strongly the urge to hit “undo” and rewrite our story into one where everything goes well. I find hope in my feeling of a capacity growing inside me to acknowledge that this is unattainable, and to realize that, when I’m occupied with attempting to reschedule a vacation, what I truly require is to sob.