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I hope you had a pleasant summer: I did not. The very day we were supposed to be take a vacation, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have prompt but common surgery, which resulted in our travel plans needed to be cancelled.

From this episode I learned something important, 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, quietly devastating disappointments that – without the ability to actually feel them – will truly burden us.

When we were meant to be on holiday but were not, I kept sensing an urge 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 depressed. And then I would face the reality that this holiday had truly vanished: my husband’s surgery involved frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a limited time window for an relaxing trip on the Belgium's beaches. So, no vacation. Just letdown and irritation, pain and care.

I know graver situations can happen, it's merely a vacation, what a privileged problem to have – I know because I used that reasoning too. But what I required was to be honest with myself. In those instances when I was able to halt battling the disappointment and we discussed it instead, it felt like we were facing it as a team. Instead of being down and trying to smile, I’ve given myself permission 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 appreciate our moments at home together.

This brought to mind of a desire I sometimes see in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also experienced in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could in some way erase our difficult moments, like clicking “undo”. But that button only looks to the past. Facing the reality that this is impossible and embracing the pain and fury for things not working out how we hoped, rather than a insincere positive spin, can promote a transformation: from denial and depression, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it needs duration – this can be life-changing.

We consider depression as experiencing negativity – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a repressing of frustration and sorrow and letdown and happiness and life force, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of honest emotional expression and liberty.

I have often found myself stuck in this urge to reverse things, but my little one is supporting my evolution. As a recent parent, I was at times swamped by the incredible needs of my baby. Not only the feeding – sometimes for a lengthy period at a time, and then again less than an hour after that – and not only the changing, and then the repeating the process before you’ve even ended the change you were changing. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – efficiency blended with affection – are a comfort and a significant blessing. Though they’re also, at moments, unceasing and exhausting. What astounded me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the psychological needs.

I had assumed my most primary duty as a mother was to fulfill my infant's requirements. But I soon realized that it was not possible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her craving could seem unmeetable; my supply could not arrive quickly, or it came too fast. 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 consoled by the hugs we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were lost to us, that nothing we had to offer could help.

I soon learned that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to persevere, and then to help her digest the powerful sentiments triggered by the unattainability of my protecting her from all unease. 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 milk didn’t come, or when she was hurting, or any other hard and bewildering experience – and I had to develop alongside her (and my) frustration, rage, despair, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to ensure everything was perfect, but to support in creating understanding to her emotional experience of things being less than perfect.

This was the distinction, for her, between having someone who was trying to give her only good feelings, and instead being supported in building a capacity to experience all feelings. It was the difference, for me, between desiring to experience excellent about doing a perfect job as a flawless caregiver, and instead developing the capacity to accept my own shortcomings in order to do a good enough job – and comprehend my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The difference between my seeking to prevent 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 click erase and alter our history into one where things are ideal. I find optimism in my feeling of a skill evolving internally to acknowledge that this is impossible, and to comprehend that, when I’m focused on striving to rearrange a trip, what I really need is to weep.