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I wish you enjoyed a enjoyable summer: my experience was different. That day we were scheduled to go on holiday, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have urgent but routine surgery, which meant our vacation arrangements needed to be cancelled.

From this experience I gained insight significant, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to experience sadness when things don't work out. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more everyday, subtly crushing disappointments that – unless we can actually experience them – will truly burden us.

When we were meant to be on holiday but were not, 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 remained low, just a bit blue. And then I would bump up against the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery involved frequent uncomfortable wound care, and there is a short period for an enjoyable break on the shores of Belgium. 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 tested that argument too. But what I required was to be honest with myself. In those instances when I was able to cease resisting the disappointment and we talked about it instead, it felt like we were facing it as a team. Instead of feeling depressed and trying to appear happy, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and hatred and rage, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even was feasible to value our days at home together.

This recalled of a hope I sometimes observe in my therapy clients, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could somehow erase our difficult moments, like clicking “undo”. But that arrow only points backwards. Confronting the reality that this is not possible and embracing the pain and fury for things not happening how we expected, rather than a false optimism, can enable a shift: from rejection and low mood, to development and opportunity. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be profoundly impactful.

We view depression as experiencing negativity – but to my mind it’s a kind of deadening of all emotions, a pressing down of frustration and sorrow and disappointment and joy and energy, and all the rest. The substitute for depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and liberty.

I have often found myself caught in this desire to click “undo”, but my toddler is supporting my evolution. As a first-time mom, I was at times swamped by the astonishing demands of my infant. Not only the feeding – sometimes for over an hour 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 finished the swap you were changing. These everyday important activities among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a solace and a significant blessing. Though they’re also, at moments, persistent and tiring. What shocked me the most – aside from the sleep deprivation – were the psychological needs.

I had assumed my most key role as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon understood that it was unfeasible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her appetite could seem insatiable; my supply could not come fast enough, or it came too fast. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she hated being changed, and sobbed as if she were falling into a gloomy abyss of despair. 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 aid.

I soon realized that my most important job as a mother was first to endure, and then to support her in managing the powerful sentiments provoked by the impossibility of my protecting her from all distress. As she developed her capacity to take in and digest milk, she also had to build an ability to process her feelings and her distress when the supply was insufficient, or when she was in pain, or any other challenging and perplexing 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 assist in finding significance to her emotional experience of things being less than perfect.

This was the distinction, for her, between being with someone who was seeking to offer her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being supported in building a ability to feel every emotion. It was the difference, for me, between desiring to experience great about doing a perfect job as a ideal parent, and instead cultivating the skill to endure my own shortcomings in order to do a good enough job – and grasp my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The contrast between my attempting to halt her crying, and recognizing when she needed to cry.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel less keenly the wish to press reverse and change our narrative into one where things are ideal. I find optimism in my feeling of a ability growing inside me to recognise that this is unattainable, and to realize that, when I’m focused on striving to rearrange a trip, what I really need is to weep.