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I wish you enjoyed a pleasant summer: my experience was different. That day we were supposed to be go on holiday, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have urgent but routine surgery, which caused our getaway ideas had to be cancelled.

From this situation I realized a truth important, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to experience sadness when things don't work out. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more common, quietly devastating disappointments that – if we don't actually acknowledge them – will significantly depress us.

When we were meant to be on holiday but could not be, I kept sensing an urge 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 depressed. And then I would confront the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery required frequent uncomfortable wound care, and there is a limited time window for an enjoyable break on the Belgian coast. So, no holiday. Just letdown and irritation, suffering and attention.

I know worse things 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 instances when I was able to stop fighting off the disappointment and we talked about it instead, it felt like we were going through something together. Instead of experiencing sadness and trying to appear happy, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of unpleasant emotions, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and loathing and fury, which at least felt real. At times, it even became possible to enjoy our time at home together.

This recalled of a wish I sometimes observe in my therapy clients, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could perhaps reverse our unwanted experiences, like hitting a reverse switch. 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 hoped, rather than a insincere positive spin, can promote a transformation: from avoidance and sadness, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be profoundly impactful.

We view depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a repressing of frustration and sorrow and frustration and delight and life force, and all the rest. The substitute for depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of honest emotional expression and release.

I have frequently found myself caught in this wish to erase events, but my young child is supporting my evolution. As a recent parent, I was at times burdened by the incredible needs of my infant. Not only the feeding – sometimes for a lengthy period at a time, and then again less than an hour after that – and not only the changing, and then the changing again before you’ve even finished the change you were handling. These everyday important activities among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a comfort and a tremendous privilege. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What surprised me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the psychological needs.

I had believed my most primary duty as a mother was to fulfill my infant's requirements. But I soon understood that it was impossible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her craving could seem unmeetable; my milk could not be produced rapidly, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to change her – but she disliked being changed, and sobbed as if she were descending into a gloomy abyss of despair. And while sometimes she seemed consoled by the embraces we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were separated from us, that no comfort we gave could help.

I soon learned that my most important job as a mother was first to endure, and then to support her in managing the powerful sentiments caused by the impossibility of my guarding her from all unease. As she enhanced her skill to ingest and absorb milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to process her feelings and her pain when the nourishment was delayed, or when she was hurting, or any other challenging and perplexing experience – and I had to evolve with her (and my) irritation, anger, hopelessness, loathing, discontent, need. My job was not to make things go well, but to support in creating understanding to her feelings journey of things not working out ideally.

This was the distinction, for her, between experiencing someone who was trying to give her only good feelings, and instead being assisted in developing a ability to feel every emotion. It was the distinction, for me, between aiming to have wonderful about executing ideally as a ideal parent, and instead building the ability to tolerate my own shortcomings in order to do a adequately performed – and grasp my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The contrast between my trying to stop her crying, and recognizing when she needed to cry.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel less keenly the desire to hit “undo” and rewrite our story into one where all is perfect. I find optimism in my sense of a ability developing within to acknowledge that this is not possible, and to realize that, when I’m occupied with attempting to rebook a holiday, what I really need is to cry.