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I wish you enjoyed a good summer: my experience was different. The very day we were scheduled to go on holiday, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which meant our travel plans needed to be cancelled.

From this episode I realized a truth important, all over again, about how hard it is for me to feel bad when things don't work out. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more common, subtly crushing disappointments that – unless we can actually acknowledge them – will significantly depress us.

When we were expected to be on holiday but could not be, I kept feeling a tug towards looking for silver linings: “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 face the reality that this holiday had truly vanished: my husband’s surgery necessitated frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a limited time window for an relaxing trip on the Belgian coast. So, no getaway. Just disappointment and frustration, hurt and nurturing.

I know graver situations can happen, it's just a trip, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I tried that line too. But what I needed was to be truthful to myself. In those instances when I was able to stop fighting off the disappointment and we talked about it instead, it felt like we were sharing an experience. Instead of feeling depressed and trying to smile, I’ve given myself permission all sorts of difficult sentiments, 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 brought to mind of a wish I sometimes observe in my counseling individuals, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could somehow erase our difficult moments, like pressing a reset button. But that button only goes in reverse. Acknowledging the reality that this is impossible and accepting the pain and fury for things not happening how we hoped, rather than a false optimism, can facilitate a change of current: from rejection and low mood, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it needs duration – this can be profoundly impactful.

We consider depression as experiencing negativity – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a pressing down of frustration and sorrow and letdown and happiness and life force, and all the rest. The substitute for depression is not happiness, but acknowledging every sentiment, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and freedom.

I have often found myself stuck in this desire to reverse things, but my toddler is helping me to grow out of it. As a first-time mom, I was at times overwhelmed by the astonishing demands of my baby. Not only the nursing – sometimes for over an hour at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the diaper swaps, and then the changing again before you’ve even finished the swap you were changing. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – efficiency blended with affection – are a solace and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, unceasing and exhausting. What astounded me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the feelings requirements.

I had thought my most primary duty as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. But I soon understood that it was not possible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her appetite could seem endless; my milk could not arrive quickly, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to change her – but she hated being changed, and cried as if she were plunging into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed consoled by the hugs we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were distant from us, that no solution we provided could aid.

I soon learned that my most important job as a mother was first to survive, and then to assist her process the intense emotions provoked by the infeasibility of my shielding her from all unease. As she grew her ability to take in and digest milk, she also had to develop a capacity to process her feelings and her distress when the supply was insufficient, or when she was hurting, or any other hard and bewildering experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) annoyance, fury, despondency, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to ensure everything was perfect, but to support in creating understanding to her emotional experience of things not working out ideally.

This was the difference, for her, between experiencing someone who was seeking to offer her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being helped to grow a capacity to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the distinction, for me, between wanting to feel excellent about executing ideally as a flawless caregiver, and instead cultivating the skill to accept my own shortcomings in order to do a adequately performed – and comprehend my daughter’s letdown and frustration with me. The distinction between my trying to stop her crying, and understanding when she needed to cry.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel not as strongly the desire to click erase and alter our history into one where things are ideal. I find faith in my sense of a skill evolving internally to recognise that this is impossible, and to understand that, when I’m occupied with attempting to rebook a holiday, what I truly require is to weep.