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I hope you had a pleasant summer: my experience was different. The very day we were planning to travel for leisure, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which resulted in our getaway ideas were forced to be cancelled.

From this situation I learned something valuable, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to experience sadness when things go wrong. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more everyday, quietly devastating disappointments that – unless we can actually acknowledge them – will significantly depress us.

When we were expected to be on holiday but weren't, I kept feeling a tug 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 never felt better, just a bit depressed. And then I would confront the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery necessitated frequent uncomfortable wound care, and there is a limited time window for an pleasant vacation on the Belgian coast. So, no vacation. Just discontent and annoyance, suffering and attention.

I know more serious issues can happen, it's merely a vacation, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I tried that line too. But what I wanted was to be sincere with my feelings. In those times when I was able to halt battling the disappointment and we addressed it instead, it felt like we were sharing an experience. Instead of feeling depressed and trying to smile, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of unpleasant emotions, including but not limited to anger and frustration and hatred and rage, which at least felt real. At times, it even was feasible to enjoy our time at home together.

This brought to mind of a hope I sometimes observe in my therapy clients, and that I have also experienced in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could in some way reverse our unwanted experiences, like clicking “undo”. But that option only goes in reverse. Facing the reality that this is not possible and allowing the pain and fury for things not working out how we expected, rather than a insincere positive spin, can facilitate a change of current: from denial and depression, to development and opportunity. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be transformative.

We view depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing 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 acknowledging every sentiment, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and liberty.

I have repeatedly found myself caught in this urge to reverse things, but my young child is helping me to grow out of it. As a recent parent, I was at times swamped by the incredible needs of my infant. Not only the nourishing – sometimes for a lengthy period at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the outfit alterations, and then the changing again before you’ve even finished the task you were handling. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a solace and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, persistent and tiring. What shocked 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 satisfy my child's demands. But I soon realized that it was not possible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her appetite could seem unmeetable; my nourishment could not be produced rapidly, or it came too fast. And then we needed to change her – but she disliked being changed, and wept as if she were plunging into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed consoled by the cuddles we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were lost to us, that no comfort we gave could assist.

I soon learned that my most important job as a mother was first to endure, and then to help her digest the powerful sentiments triggered by the infeasibility of my guarding her from all distress. As she enhanced her skill to take in and digest milk, she also had to develop a capacity to process her feelings and her suffering when the supply was insufficient, or when she was suffering, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) annoyance, fury, despondency, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to make things go well, but to support in creating understanding to her emotional experience of things not working out ideally.

This was the contrast, for her, between experiencing someone who was trying to give her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being supported in building a capacity to experience all feelings. It was the distinction, for me, between wanting to feel great about doing a perfect job as a perfect mother, and instead building the ability to endure my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a good enough job – and understand my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The contrast between my attempting to halt her crying, and comprehending when she required to weep.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel reduced the wish to hit “undo” and change our narrative into one where things are ideal. I find hope in my awareness of a capacity growing inside me to acknowledge that this is impossible, and to realize that, when I’m focused on striving to rebook a holiday, what I really need is to cry.