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I hope you had a good summer: I did not. The very day we were supposed to be go on holiday, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, expecting him to have prompt but common surgery, which meant our getaway ideas needed to be cancelled.

From this situation I learned something important, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to experience sadness when things take a turn. I’m not talking about major catastrophes, but the more routine, quietly devastating disappointments that – without the ability to actually feel them – will really weigh us down.

When we were expected 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 didn't improve, just a bit depressed. And then I would bump up against the reality that this holiday had truly vanished: my husband’s surgery necessitated frequent uncomfortable wound care, and there is a finite opportunity for an enjoyable break on the Belgian coast. So, no holiday. Just discontent and annoyance, hurt and nurturing.

I know graver situations can happen, it's just a trip, what a privileged problem to have – I know because I used that reasoning too. But what I wanted was to be sincere with my feelings. In those moments 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 granted myself all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and aversion and wrath, which at least felt real. At times, it even became possible to enjoy our time at home together.

This reminded me of a wish I sometimes see in my therapy clients, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could in some way undo our negative events, like clicking “undo”. But that arrow only looks to the past. Facing the reality that this is unattainable and allowing the grief and rage for things not happening how we anticipated, rather than a false optimism, can facilitate a change of current: from denial and depression, to development and opportunity. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be transformative.

We consider depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a suppressing of anger and sadness and frustration and delight and vitality, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but acknowledging every sentiment, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and freedom.

I have frequently found myself trapped in this wish to reverse things, but my young child is helping me to grow out of it. As a new mother, I was at times swamped by the astonishing demands of my infant. Not only the feeding – sometimes for more than 60 minutes at a time, and then again under 60 minutes after that – and not only the diaper swaps, and then the doing it once more before you’ve even ended the task you were doing. These everyday important activities among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a solace and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What shocked me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the psychological needs.

I had assumed my most key role as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon realized that it was not possible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her appetite could seem insatiable; my nourishment could not be produced rapidly, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she hated being changed, and wept as if she were falling into a gloomy abyss of despair. And while sometimes she seemed consoled by the embraces we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were lost to us, that no solution we provided could aid.

I soon realized that my most important job as a mother was first to persevere, and then to support her in managing the powerful sentiments caused by the infeasibility of my guarding her from all distress. As she developed her capacity to consume and process milk, she also had to develop a capacity to digest her emotions and her distress when the supply was insufficient, or when she was suffering, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) frustration, rage, despair, hatred, disappointment, hunger. My job was not to make things go well, 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 trying to give her only positive emotions, and instead being supported in building a capacity to experience all feelings. It was the distinction, for me, between desiring to experience great about doing a perfect job as a flawless caregiver, and instead building the ability to endure my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a good enough job – and grasp my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The contrast between my trying to stop her crying, and recognizing when she had to sob.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel not as strongly the urge to hit “undo” and rewrite our story into one where all is perfect. I find faith in my feeling of a ability growing inside me to understand that this is impossible, and to realize that, when I’m occupied with attempting to reschedule a vacation, what I actually want is to sob.