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I hope you had a good summer: I did not. The very day we were supposed to be go on holiday, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, expecting him to have urgent but routine surgery, which meant our getaway ideas were forced to be cancelled.

From this experience I learned something significant, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to experience sadness when things take a turn. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more everyday, quietly devastating disappointments that – if we don't actually acknowledge them – will really weigh us down.

When we were expected to be on holiday but could not be, I kept sensing an urge 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 necessitated frequent uncomfortable wound care, and there is a limited time window for an pleasant vacation on the Belgium's beaches. So, no vacation. Just discontent and annoyance, suffering and attention.

I know more serious issues can happen, it's just a trip, such a fortunate concern to have – I know because I tried that line too. But what I needed was to be honest with myself. In those times when I was able to stop fighting off the disappointment and we addressed it instead, it felt like we were facing it as a team. Instead of experiencing sadness and trying to appear happy, I’ve given myself permission all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and aversion and wrath, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even was feasible to value our days at home together.

This brought to mind of a desire I sometimes see in my therapy clients, and that I have also experienced in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could perhaps erase our difficult moments, like pressing a reset button. But that option only goes in reverse. Confronting the reality that this is unattainable and embracing the pain and fury for things not working out how we hoped, rather than a false optimism, can enable a shift: from avoidance and sadness, to development and opportunity. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be transformative.

We think of depression as experiencing negativity – but to my mind it’s a kind of deadening of all emotions, a suppressing of frustration and sorrow and disappointment and joy and life force, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and freedom.

I have repeatedly found myself trapped in this desire to click “undo”, but my young child is assisting me in moving past it. As a new mother, I was at times burdened by the incredible needs of my infant. Not only the feeding – sometimes for more than 60 minutes at a time, and then again under 60 minutes after that – and not only the outfit alterations, and then the doing it once more before you’ve even completed the task you were handling. 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 surprised me the most – aside from the sleep deprivation – were the psychological needs.

I had thought my most primary duty as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. But I soon came to realise that it was not possible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her craving could seem insatiable; my supply could not be produced rapidly, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to change her – but she despised being changed, and cried as if she were falling into a shadowy pit of misery. And while sometimes she seemed soothed by the hugs we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were separated from us, that no comfort we gave could assist.

I soon learned that my most crucial role as a mother was first to endure, and then to support her in managing the powerful sentiments caused by the infeasibility of my guarding her from all distress. As she enhanced her skill to ingest and absorb milk, she also had to build an ability to digest her emotions and her suffering when the milk didn’t come, or when she was suffering, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) annoyance, fury, despondency, hatred, disappointment, hunger. My job was not to ensure everything was perfect, but to support in creating understanding to her sentimental path of things being less than perfect.

This was the distinction, for her, between being with someone who was trying to give her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being supported in building a ability to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the contrast, for me, between aiming to have excellent about performing flawlessly as a ideal parent, and instead building the ability to accept my own imperfections in order to do a good enough job – and understand my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The contrast between my trying to stop her crying, and comprehending when she needed to cry.

Now that we have developed beyond this together, I feel not as strongly the desire to hit “undo” and change our narrative 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 comprehend that, when I’m occupied with attempting to rearrange a trip, what I actually want is to sob.