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I trust your a good summer: my experience was different. That day we were scheduled to take a vacation, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, expecting him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which meant our vacation arrangements had to be cancelled.

From this experience I realized a truth valuable, 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 routine, gently heartbreaking disappointments that – unless we can actually feel them – will truly burden us.

When we were supposed to be on holiday but weren't, I kept experiencing a pull 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 blue. And then I would bump up against the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery involved frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a short period for an relaxing trip on the Belgium's beaches. So, no getaway. Just disappointment and frustration, suffering and attention.

I know graver situations can happen, it’s only a holiday, what a privileged problem to have – I know because I tested that argument 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 going through something together. Instead of feeling depressed and trying to appear happy, I’ve granted myself all sorts of unpleasant emotions, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and hatred and rage, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even was feasible to enjoy our time at home together.

This recalled of a hope I sometimes observe in my therapy clients, and that I have also experienced in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could perhaps reverse our unwanted experiences, like pressing a reset button. But that arrow only goes in reverse. Confronting the reality that this is not possible and allowing the pain and fury for things not turning out how we anticipated, rather than a insincere positive spin, can facilitate a change of current: from denial and depression, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it needs duration – this can be transformative.

We consider depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of dulling of all emotions, a pressing down of anger and sadness and disappointment and joy and energy, and all the rest. The substitute for depression is not happiness, but acknowledging every sentiment, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and release.

I have frequently found myself caught in this urge to erase events, but my young child is assisting me in moving past it. As a recent parent, I was at times swamped by the amazing requirements of my infant. Not only the feeding – sometimes for a lengthy period at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the changing, and then the changing again before you’ve even finished the change 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 exhaustion – were the psychological needs.

I had believed my most important job as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. But I soon realized that it was not possible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her hunger could seem unmeetable; my milk could not be produced rapidly, or it came too fast. And then we needed to change her – but she disliked being changed, and sobbed as if she were plunging into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed consoled by the embraces we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were distant from us, that no solution we provided could assist.

I soon realized that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to persevere, and then to assist her process the overwhelming feelings caused by the impossibility of my guarding her from all distress. As she grew her ability to ingest and absorb milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to process her feelings and her pain when the supply was insufficient, or when she was hurting, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to develop alongside 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 not going so well.

This was the difference, for her, between being with someone who was attempting to provide her only positive emotions, and instead being helped to grow a capacity to feel every emotion. It was the difference, for me, between wanting to feel wonderful about executing ideally as a perfect mother, and instead building the ability to tolerate my own imperfections in order to do a adequately performed – and comprehend my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The difference between my trying to stop her crying, and understanding when she required to weep.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel reduced the desire to click erase and change our narrative into one where all is perfect. I find optimism in my awareness of a ability growing inside me to recognise that this is unattainable, and to realize that, when I’m focused on striving to rebook a holiday, what I truly require is to sob.