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I hope you had a enjoyable summer: mine was not. The very day we were supposed to be travel for leisure, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have prompt but common surgery, which resulted in our travel plans were forced to be cancelled.

From this episode I realized a truth valuable, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to feel bad when things take a turn. I’m not talking about major catastrophes, but the more routine, gently heartbreaking disappointments that – without the ability to actually feel them – will significantly depress us.

When we were supposed to be on holiday but could not be, I kept sensing an urge 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 didn't improve, just a bit depressed. And then I would bump up against the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery necessitated frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a limited time window for an enjoyable break on the Belgian coast. So, no vacation. Just discontent and annoyance, suffering and attention.

I know worse things can happen, it's merely a vacation, such a fortunate concern to have – I know because I tested that argument too. But what I wanted was to be honest with myself. In those instances when I was able to cease resisting the disappointment and we discussed it instead, it felt like we were sharing an experience. Instead of feeling depressed and trying to smile, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to anger and frustration and loathing and fury, which at least seemed authentic. At times, it even was feasible to value our days at home together.

This brought to mind of a desire I sometimes notice in my therapy clients, and that I have also experienced in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could perhaps erase our difficult moments, like pressing a reset button. But that button only points backwards. Acknowledging the reality that this is unattainable and allowing the sorrow and anger for things not happening how we anticipated, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can enable a shift: from rejection and low mood, 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 anger and sadness and letdown and happiness and energy, and all the rest. The opposite of 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 erase events, but my toddler is helping me to grow out of it. As a new mother, I was at times burdened by the incredible needs of my baby. Not only the feeding – sometimes for a lengthy period at a time, and then again under 60 minutes after that – and not only the changing, and then the doing it once more before you’ve even completed the task you were handling. These everyday important activities among so many others – efficiency blended with affection – are a comfort and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, persistent and tiring. What shocked me the most – aside from the sleep deprivation – were the psychological needs.

I had assumed my most important job as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. But I soon came to realise that it was impossible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her craving could seem insatiable; my nourishment could not come fast enough, or it came too fast. And then we needed to change her – but she disliked being changed, and sobbed as if she were plunging into a gloomy abyss of despair. And while sometimes she seemed consoled by the cuddles we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were separated from us, that no comfort we gave could assist.

I soon discovered that my most important job as a mother was first to survive, and then to assist her process the intense emotions provoked by the infeasibility of my guarding her from all distress. As she enhanced her skill to ingest and absorb milk, she also had to build an ability to manage her sentiments and her suffering when the nourishment was delayed, or when she was in pain, or any other challenging and perplexing experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) irritation, anger, hopelessness, loathing, discontent, need. My job was not to guarantee smooth experiences, but to support in creating understanding to her sentimental path of things being less than perfect.

This was the difference, for her, between having someone who was trying to give her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being helped to grow a capacity to feel every emotion. It was the contrast, for me, between desiring to experience wonderful about performing flawlessly as a perfect mother, and instead building the ability to tolerate my own shortcomings in order to do a sufficiently well – and grasp my daughter’s letdown and frustration with me. The contrast between my trying to stop her crying, and understanding when she had to sob.

Now that we have developed beyond this together, I feel not as strongly the wish to click erase and alter our history into one where all is perfect. I find hope in my awareness of a capacity growing inside me to understand that this is impossible, and to comprehend that, when I’m busy trying to reschedule a vacation, what I actually want is to cry.