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I trust your a enjoyable summer: my experience was different. That day we were scheduled to take a vacation, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have urgent but routine surgery, which caused our vacation arrangements had to be cancelled.

From this experience I realized a truth important, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to experience sadness when things go wrong. I’m not talking about major catastrophes, but the more common, subtly crushing disappointments that – if we don't actually acknowledge them – will really weigh us down.

When we were expected to be on holiday but were not, I kept experiencing a pull 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 depressed. And then I would face the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery involved frequent uncomfortable wound care, and there is a short period for an pleasant vacation on the Belgian coast. So, no vacation. Just letdown and irritation, suffering and attention.

I know worse things can happen, it's merely a vacation, what a privileged problem to have – I know because I tried that line too. But what I required was to be honest with myself. In those moments 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 experiencing sadness and trying to appear happy, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and loathing and fury, which at least seemed authentic. At times, it even became possible to value our days at home together.

This reminded me of a desire I sometimes notice in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also witnessed 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. Acknowledging the reality that this is impossible and embracing the sorrow and anger for things not turning out how we expected, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can enable a shift: 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 being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of deadening of all emotions, a pressing down of rage and grief and letdown and happiness and life force, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and liberty.

I have frequently found myself caught in this desire to erase events, but my young child is helping me to grow out of it. As a new mother, I was at times overwhelmed by the incredible needs of my newborn. Not only the nourishing – 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 finished the change you were doing. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – efficiency blended with affection – are a reassurance and a tremendous privilege. Though they’re also, at moments, persistent and tiring. What astounded me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the psychological needs.

I had believed my most primary duty 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 needed it. Her hunger could seem insatiable; my supply could not arrive quickly, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to alter her clothes – but she despised being changed, and cried as if she were descending into a gloomy abyss of despair. And while sometimes she seemed comforted by the embraces we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were lost to us, that no solution we provided could aid.

I soon realized that my most important job as a mother was first to endure, and then to help her digest the overwhelming feelings provoked by the impossibility of my guarding her from all distress. As she enhanced her skill to take in and digest milk, she also had to build an ability to digest her emotions and her pain when the milk didn’t come, or when she was hurting, or any other challenging and perplexing experience – and I had to develop alongside her (and my) annoyance, fury, despondency, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to make things go well, but to assist in finding significance to her feelings journey of things not working out ideally.

This was the distinction, for her, between experiencing someone who was seeking to offer her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being supported in building a capacity to experience all feelings. It was the difference, for me, between wanting to feel wonderful about doing a perfect job as a ideal parent, and instead developing the capacity to tolerate my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a sufficiently well – and comprehend my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The difference between my seeking to prevent her crying, and recognizing when she had to sob.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel reduced the desire to click erase and change our narrative into one where things are ideal. I find optimism in my feeling of a capacity growing inside me to understand that this is not possible, and to comprehend that, when I’m focused on striving to rebook a holiday, what I really need is to cry.