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I wish you enjoyed a good summer: mine was not. That day we were planning to go on holiday, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have prompt but common surgery, which meant our travel plans needed to be cancelled.

From this situation I learned something valuable, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to feel bad when things take a turn. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more common, gently heartbreaking disappointments that – unless we can actually feel them – will truly burden us.

When we were meant to be on holiday but were not, 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 never felt better, just a bit blue. And then I would confront the reality that this holiday had truly vanished: my husband’s surgery necessitated frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a finite opportunity for an relaxing trip on the Belgian coast. So, no getaway. Just discontent and annoyance, hurt and nurturing.

I know graver situations can happen, it’s only a holiday, such a fortunate concern to have – I know because I tried that line too. But what I needed was to be sincere with my feelings. In those moments when I was able to cease resisting 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 granted myself all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and aversion and wrath, which at least felt real. At times, it even was feasible to appreciate our moments at home together.

This reminded me of a hope I sometimes see in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could perhaps undo our negative events, like clicking “undo”. But that option only looks to the past. Confronting the reality that this is impossible and allowing the grief and rage for things not happening how we hoped, rather than a insincere positive spin, can facilitate a change of current: from denial and depression, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be transformative.

We view depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of dulling of all emotions, a repressing of frustration and sorrow and frustration and delight and energy, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of honest emotional expression and liberty.

I have repeatedly found myself trapped in this urge to reverse things, but my little one is supporting my evolution. As a new mother, I was at times swamped by the incredible needs of my infant. Not only the feeding – sometimes for a lengthy period at a time, and then again under 60 minutes after that – and not only the outfit alterations, and then the repeating the process before you’ve even ended the swap you were doing. These routine valuable duties among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a reassurance and a significant blessing. Though they’re also, at moments, unceasing and exhausting. What shocked me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the feelings requirements.

I had thought my most primary duty as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon realized that it was unfeasible to meet all of my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her hunger could seem unmeetable; my supply could not arrive quickly, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to alter her clothes – but she disliked being changed, and sobbed as if she were falling into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed comforted by the hugs we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were lost to us, that no comfort we gave could help.

I soon realized that my most important job as a mother was first to survive, and then to help her digest the intense emotions caused by the impossibility of my shielding her from all unease. As she developed her capacity to consume and process milk, she also had to develop a capacity to digest her emotions and her suffering when the supply was insufficient, or when she was in pain, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) annoyance, fury, despondency, loathing, discontent, need. My job was not to make things go well, but to assist in finding significance to her sentimental path of things not going so well.

This was the difference, for her, between being with someone who was seeking to offer her only good feelings, and instead being assisted in developing a ability to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the contrast, for me, between aiming to have great about doing a perfect job as a ideal parent, and instead building the ability to accept my own imperfections in order to do a good enough job – and grasp my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The distinction between my attempting to halt her crying, and recognizing when she required to weep.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel not as strongly the wish to click erase and alter our history into one where everything goes well. I find hope in my sense of a skill growing inside me to acknowledge that this is not possible, and to comprehend that, when I’m occupied with attempting to rebook a holiday, what I really need is to sob.