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I hope you had a enjoyable summer: I did not. That day we were scheduled to travel for leisure, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which resulted in our travel plans had to be cancelled.

From this situation I realized a truth important, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to experience sadness when things take a turn. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more routine, subtly crushing disappointments that – if we don't actually feel them – will truly burden us.

When we were supposed 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 never felt better, just a bit depressed. And then I would confront the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery required frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a short period for an relaxing trip on the shores of Belgium. So, no holiday. Just discontent and annoyance, hurt and nurturing.

I know worse things can happen, it’s only a holiday, 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 times when I was able to stop fighting off the disappointment and we talked about it instead, it felt like we were facing it as a team. Instead of being down and trying to smile, I’ve granted myself all sorts of unpleasant emotions, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and aversion and wrath, which at least seemed authentic. At times, it even became possible to value our days at home together.

This brought to mind of a wish I sometimes observe in my therapy clients, and that I have also witnessed 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 points backwards. Confronting the reality that this is unattainable and accepting the sorrow and anger for things not turning out how we hoped, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can facilitate a change of current: from avoidance and sadness, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be profoundly impactful.

We view 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 disappointment and joy and energy, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of honest emotional expression and liberty.

I have often found myself trapped in this urge to click “undo”, but my young child is assisting me in moving past it. As a new mother, I was at times burdened by the amazing requirements of my baby. Not only the nursing – 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 repeating the process before you’ve even finished the swap you were handling. 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, persistent and tiring. What surprised me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the feelings requirements.

I had thought my most important job as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon realized that it was impossible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her hunger could seem endless; my nourishment could not come fast enough, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she despised being changed, and cried as if she were plunging into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed comforted by the hugs 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 crucial role as a mother was first to persevere, and then to support her in managing the intense emotions triggered by the infeasibility of my shielding her from all unease. As she grew her ability to ingest and absorb milk, she also had to develop a capacity to digest her emotions and her suffering when the supply was insufficient, or when she was suffering, or any other challenging and perplexing experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) irritation, anger, hopelessness, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to ensure everything was perfect, but to help bring meaning to her feelings journey of things being less than perfect.

This was the difference, for her, between experiencing someone who was seeking to offer her only positive emotions, and instead being assisted in developing a capacity to feel every emotion. It was the contrast, for me, between aiming to have wonderful about doing a perfect job as a ideal parent, and instead building the ability to accept my own shortcomings in order to do a sufficiently well – and understand my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The difference between my trying to stop her crying, and comprehending when she needed to cry.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel not as strongly the wish to click erase and change our narrative into one where things are ideal. I find faith in my feeling of a skill evolving internally to understand that this is not possible, and to comprehend that, when I’m focused on striving to rebook a holiday, what I truly require is to sob.