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I trust your a good summer: my experience was different. The very day we were planning to travel for leisure, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have urgent but routine surgery, which meant our travel plans were forced to be cancelled.

From this situation I realized a truth valuable, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to feel bad when things take a turn. I’m not talking about major catastrophes, but the more common, quietly devastating disappointments that – if we don't actually feel them – will significantly depress us.

When we were meant to be on holiday but could not be, I kept feeling a tug 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 never felt better, just a bit down. And then I would confront the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: 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 letdown and irritation, hurt and nurturing.

I know more serious issues can happen, it's merely a vacation, what a privileged problem to have – I know because I tried that line too. But what I required was to be honest with myself. In those times 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 being down and trying to appear happy, I’ve given myself permission all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and aversion and wrath, which at least felt real. At times, it even became possible to enjoy our time at home together.

This brought to mind of a desire I sometimes notice in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also seen in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could in some way erase our difficult moments, like pressing a reset button. But that button only goes in reverse. Facing the reality that this is unattainable and embracing the sorrow and anger for things not happening how we expected, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can facilitate a change of current: from denial and depression, to development and opportunity. Over time – and, of course, it needs duration – this can be life-changing.

We think of depression as experiencing negativity – but to my mind it’s a kind of deadening of all emotions, a suppressing of rage and grief and disappointment and joy and energy, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and release.

I have frequently found myself stuck in this wish to click “undo”, but my little one is supporting my evolution. As a recent parent, I was at times burdened by the incredible needs of my infant. Not only the nourishing – sometimes for over an hour at a time, and then again less than an hour after that – and not only the changing, and then the doing it once more before you’ve even completed the change you were changing. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a solace and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, unceasing and exhausting. What astounded me the most – aside from the sleep deprivation – were the emotional demands.

I had believed my most important job as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon came to realise that it was unfeasible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her craving could seem endless; my milk could not come fast enough, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to change her – but she hated being changed, and wept as if she were falling into a gloomy abyss of despair. And while sometimes she seemed soothed by the embraces we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were lost to us, that no solution we provided could assist.

I soon realized that my most important job as a mother was first to endure, and then to assist her process the intense emotions triggered by the infeasibility of my shielding her from all discomfort. As she developed her capacity to consume and process milk, she also had to develop a capacity to manage her sentiments and her pain when the supply was insufficient, or when she was suffering, or any other hard and bewildering experience – and I had to develop alongside her (and my) frustration, rage, despair, hatred, disappointment, hunger. My job was not to make things go well, but to support in creating understanding to her sentimental path of things not going so well.

This was the difference, for her, between being with 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 aiming to have great about doing a perfect job as a flawless caregiver, and instead developing the capacity to accept my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a sufficiently well – and grasp my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The difference between my seeking to prevent her crying, and recognizing when she required to weep.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel less keenly the desire to click erase and alter our history into one where things are ideal. I find optimism in my awareness of a skill evolving internally to recognise that this is unattainable, and to realize that, when I’m focused on striving to rebook a holiday, what I actually want is to sob.