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I wish you enjoyed a good summer: mine was not. That day we were scheduled to travel for leisure, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which resulted in our getaway ideas were forced to be cancelled.

From this situation I gained insight significant, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to experience sadness when things go wrong. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more everyday, quietly devastating disappointments that – if we don't actually acknowledge them – will truly burden us.

When we were supposed 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 remained low, just a bit blue. And then I would face the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery necessitated frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a finite opportunity for an enjoyable break on the Belgium's beaches. So, no getaway. Just disappointment and frustration, hurt and nurturing.

I know worse things can happen, it’s only a holiday, 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 moments when I was able to halt battling the disappointment and we discussed it instead, it felt like we were going through something together. Instead of experiencing sadness and trying to put on a brave face, I’ve granted myself all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and aversion and wrath, which at least felt real. At times, it even was feasible to enjoy our time at home together.

This reminded me of a desire I sometimes observe in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could perhaps undo our negative events, like hitting a reverse switch. But that arrow only points backwards. Confronting the reality that this is unattainable and allowing the sorrow and anger for things not turning out how we anticipated, rather than a false optimism, can facilitate a change of current: from rejection and low mood, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it needs duration – this can be transformative.

We think of depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a suppressing of frustration and sorrow and letdown and happiness and energy, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but acknowledging every sentiment, a kind of honest emotional expression and liberty.

I have frequently found myself trapped in this urge to click “undo”, but my young child is assisting me in moving past it. As a first-time mom, I was at times overwhelmed by the astonishing demands of my infant. Not only the feeding – sometimes for more than 60 minutes at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the diaper swaps, and then the doing it once more before you’ve even completed the change you were doing. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a reassurance and a significant blessing. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What astounded me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the emotional demands.

I had thought my most key role as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon understood that it was unfeasible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her hunger could seem insatiable; my supply could not arrive quickly, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to alter her clothes – but she despised being changed, and wept as if she were plunging into a shadowy pit of misery. 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 no comfort we gave could assist.

I soon learned that my most crucial role as a mother was first to persevere, and then to assist her process the powerful sentiments provoked by the infeasibility of my protecting her from all discomfort. As she grew her ability to consume and process milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to digest her emotions and her pain when the milk didn’t come, or when she was suffering, or any other challenging and perplexing experience – and I had to develop alongside her (and my) annoyance, fury, despondency, hatred, disappointment, hunger. My job was not to guarantee smooth experiences, but to support in creating understanding to her emotional experience of things being less than perfect.

This was the difference, for her, between being with someone who was seeking to offer her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being assisted in developing a ability to feel every emotion. It was the distinction, for me, between desiring to experience wonderful about doing a perfect job as a flawless caregiver, and instead building the ability to accept my own imperfections in order to do a good enough job – and grasp my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The difference between my trying to stop her crying, and understanding when she had to sob.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel reduced the wish to hit “undo” and alter our history into one where things are ideal. I find hope in my awareness of a capacity evolving internally to understand that this is unattainable, and to comprehend that, when I’m occupied with attempting to rearrange a trip, what I really need is to sob.