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I trust your a pleasant summer: mine was not. That day we were supposed to be take a vacation, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, expecting him to have urgent but routine surgery, which resulted in our vacation arrangements were forced to be cancelled.

From this episode I learned something valuable, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to feel bad when things take a turn. I’m not talking about major catastrophes, but the more common, quietly devastating disappointments that – unless we can actually experience them – will really weigh us down.

When we were meant to be on holiday but weren't, I kept experiencing a pull 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 remained low, just a bit depressed. And then I would face the reality that this holiday had truly vanished: my husband’s surgery necessitated frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a short period for an pleasant vacation on the shores of Belgium. So, no vacation. Just disappointment and frustration, pain and care.

I know graver situations can happen, it’s only a holiday, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I used that reasoning too. But what I needed was to be honest with myself. In those instances when I was able to stop fighting off the disappointment and we talked about it instead, it felt like we were going through something together. Instead of feeling depressed and trying to smile, I’ve granted myself all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and loathing and fury, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even turned out to appreciate our moments at home together.

This recalled of a wish I sometimes see in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also experienced in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could perhaps undo our negative events, like clicking “undo”. But that arrow only goes in reverse. Acknowledging the reality that this is not possible and accepting the sorrow and anger for things not happening how we anticipated, rather than a insincere positive spin, can promote a transformation: from rejection and low mood, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be transformative.

We view depression as experiencing negativity – but to my mind it’s a kind of dulling of all emotions, a pressing down of anger and sadness and disappointment and joy and energy, and all the rest. The substitute for depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and liberty.

I have often found myself caught in this urge to reverse things, but my young child is supporting my evolution. As a recent parent, I was at times burdened by the incredible needs of my newborn. Not only the nursing – sometimes for a lengthy period at a time, and then again under 60 minutes 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 – functionality combined with nurturing – are a solace and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What surprised me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the feelings requirements.

I had believed my most key role as a mother was to fulfill my infant's requirements. But I soon understood that it was impossible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her appetite could seem endless; my milk could not be produced rapidly, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to change her – but she disliked being changed, and cried 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 lost to us, that no comfort we gave could help.

I soon realized that my most crucial role as a mother was first to endure, and then to support her in managing the overwhelming feelings provoked by the impossibility of my shielding her from all distress. As she enhanced her skill to ingest and absorb milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to digest her emotions and her suffering when the nourishment was delayed, or when she was hurting, or any other hard and bewildering experience – and I had to evolve with her (and my) annoyance, fury, despondency, loathing, discontent, need. My job was not to ensure everything was perfect, but to help bring meaning to her emotional experience of things not working out ideally.

This was the contrast, for her, between having someone who was attempting to provide her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being assisted in developing a capacity to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the contrast, for me, between desiring to experience wonderful about executing ideally as a perfect mother, and instead building the ability to endure my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a good enough job – and comprehend my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The difference between my attempting to halt her crying, and recognizing when she required to weep.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel less keenly the wish to press reverse and alter our history into one where everything goes well. I find faith in my sense of a capacity growing inside me to understand that this is unattainable, and to comprehend that, when I’m busy trying to reschedule a vacation, what I really need is to weep.