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I trust your a pleasant summer: I did not. On the day we were scheduled to go on holiday, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which meant our getaway ideas needed to be cancelled.

From this situation I learned something significant, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to feel bad when things don't work out. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more routine, quietly devastating disappointments that – if we don't actually feel them – will truly burden us.

When we were expected to be on holiday but weren't, I kept feeling a tug 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 blue. And then I would face the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery involved frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a short period for an enjoyable break on the Belgium's beaches. So, no getaway. Just letdown and irritation, suffering and attention.

I know graver situations can happen, it's merely a vacation, such a fortunate concern to have – I know because I tried that line too. But what I wanted was to be sincere with my feelings. In those times when I was able to halt battling the disappointment and we talked about it instead, it felt like we were going through something together. Instead of being down and trying to smile, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of unpleasant emotions, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and hatred and rage, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even turned out to appreciate our moments at home together.

This brought to mind of a desire I sometimes notice in my therapy clients, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could somehow erase our difficult moments, like pressing a reset button. But that button only goes in reverse. Acknowledging the reality that this is impossible and allowing the grief and rage for things not working out how we hoped, rather than a insincere positive spin, can promote a transformation: from avoidance and sadness, to development and opportunity. Over time – and, of course, it needs duration – this can be transformative.

We view depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of deadening of all emotions, a repressing of anger and sadness and letdown and happiness and life force, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but acknowledging every sentiment, a kind of honest emotional expression and freedom.

I have often found myself caught in this desire to reverse things, but my little one is helping me to grow out of it. As a first-time mom, I was at times burdened by the astonishing demands of my newborn. Not only the feeding – sometimes for more than 60 minutes at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the changing, and then the doing it once more before you’ve even finished the swap you were doing. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a comfort and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What surprised me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the emotional demands.

I had thought my most important job as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. But I soon understood that it was impossible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her appetite could seem endless; my supply could not arrive quickly, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she hated being changed, and sobbed as if she were descending into a shadowy pit of misery. And while sometimes she seemed soothed by the embraces we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were separated from us, that nothing we had to offer could help.

I soon realized that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to persevere, and then to help her digest the powerful sentiments provoked by the unattainability of my shielding her from all unease. As she enhanced her skill to ingest and absorb milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to process her feelings and her distress when the milk didn’t come, or when she was in pain, or any other challenging and perplexing experience – and I had to develop alongside her (and my) annoyance, fury, despondency, loathing, discontent, need. My job was not to make things go well, but to help bring meaning 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 positive emotions, and instead being supported in building a skill to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the difference, for me, between aiming to have great about doing a perfect job as a flawless caregiver, and instead developing the capacity to endure my own shortcomings in order to do a adequately performed – and comprehend my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The contrast between my attempting to halt her crying, and recognizing when she required to weep.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel reduced the wish to press reverse and rewrite our story into one where all is perfect. I find optimism in my sense of a capacity evolving internally to understand that this is unattainable, and to comprehend that, when I’m occupied with attempting to reschedule a vacation, what I actually want is to weep.