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I trust your a enjoyable summer: mine was not. That day we were supposed to be travel for leisure, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which caused our getaway ideas needed to be cancelled.

From this episode I learned something significant, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to experience sadness when things go wrong. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more routine, gently heartbreaking disappointments that – unless we can actually experience them – will truly burden us.

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 blue. And then I would confront the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery required frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a limited time window for an relaxing trip on the Belgium's beaches. So, no holiday. Just letdown and irritation, pain and care.

I know worse things can happen, it's just a trip, such a fortunate concern to have – I know because I used that reasoning too. But what I required was to be sincere with my feelings. In those moments when I was able to stop fighting off the disappointment and we addressed it instead, it felt like we were sharing an experience. Instead of feeling depressed and trying to appear happy, I’ve granted myself all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and hatred and rage, which at least felt real. At times, it even became possible to appreciate our moments at home together.

This recalled of a wish I sometimes observe 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 hitting a reverse switch. But that button only points backwards. Confronting the reality that this is unattainable and accepting the pain and fury for things not turning out how we anticipated, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can promote a transformation: from avoidance and sadness, to development and opportunity. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be life-changing.

We consider depression as experiencing negativity – but to my mind it’s a kind of dulling of all emotions, a pressing down of frustration and sorrow and frustration and delight and energy, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and release.

I have repeatedly found myself trapped in this desire to click “undo”, but my toddler is helping me to grow out of it. As a new mother, I was at times overwhelmed by the incredible needs of my baby. Not only the nourishing – sometimes for a lengthy period at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the outfit alterations, and then the doing it once more before you’ve even ended the change you were handling. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a comfort and a significant blessing. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What shocked me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the feelings requirements.

I had thought my most important job as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon understood that it was impossible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her craving could seem insatiable; my milk could not be produced rapidly, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she disliked being changed, and cried as if she were plunging into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed soothed 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 learned that my most crucial role as a mother was first to survive, and then to assist her process the intense emotions triggered by the impossibility of my guarding her from all discomfort. As she grew her ability to ingest and absorb milk, she also had to develop a capacity to manage her sentiments and her suffering when the milk didn’t come, or when she was hurting, or any other hard and bewildering experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) annoyance, fury, despondency, loathing, discontent, need. My job was not to make things go well, but to assist in finding significance to her emotional experience of things not going so well.

This was the difference, for her, between having someone who was trying to give her only good feelings, and instead being helped to grow a capacity to feel every emotion. It was the distinction, for me, between desiring to experience great about executing ideally as a perfect mother, and instead developing the capacity to tolerate my own shortcomings in order to do a good enough job – and grasp my daughter’s letdown and frustration with me. The contrast between my seeking to prevent her crying, and recognizing when she required to weep.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel reduced the urge to click erase and rewrite our story into one where things are ideal. I find faith in my awareness of a capacity evolving internally to recognise that this is unattainable, and to comprehend that, when I’m occupied with attempting to rearrange a trip, what I actually want is to weep.