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I trust your a enjoyable summer: I did not. The very day we were supposed to be travel for leisure, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, expecting him to have prompt but common surgery, which resulted in our vacation arrangements needed to be cancelled.

From this experience I learned something important, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to experience sadness when things don't work out. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more everyday, quietly devastating disappointments that – unless we can actually acknowledge them – will significantly depress us.

When we were meant to be on holiday but could not be, 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 didn't improve, just a bit down. And then I would face the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery required frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a short period for an pleasant vacation on the Belgium's beaches. So, no holiday. Just letdown and irritation, hurt and nurturing.

I know worse things can happen, it's merely a vacation, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I tested that argument too. But what I wanted was to be honest with myself. In those moments when I was able to cease resisting the disappointment and we discussed it instead, it felt like we were facing it as a team. Instead of experiencing sadness and trying to appear happy, I’ve given myself permission all sorts of unpleasant emotions, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and loathing and fury, which at least felt real. At times, it even was feasible to enjoy our time at home together.

This brought to mind of a hope I sometimes see in my therapy clients, and that I have also experienced in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could somehow reverse our unwanted experiences, like pressing a reset button. But that button only goes in reverse. Acknowledging the reality that this is unattainable and allowing the grief and rage for things not happening how we anticipated, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can facilitate a change of current: from denial and depression, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it needs duration – this can be life-changing.

We think of depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of deadening of all emotions, a suppressing of rage and grief and frustration and delight and life force, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and liberty.

I have frequently found myself stuck in this desire to reverse things, but my toddler is helping me to grow out of it. As a new mother, I was at times overwhelmed by the astonishing demands of my newborn. Not only the nursing – sometimes for more than 60 minutes at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the outfit alterations, and then the changing again before you’ve even ended the swap you were handling. These routine valuable duties among so many others – efficiency blended with affection – 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 assumed my most important job as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. But I soon came to realise that it was unfeasible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her craving could seem endless; my milk could not arrive quickly, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she hated being changed, and wept as if she were falling into a shadowy pit of misery. And while sometimes she seemed soothed by the cuddles we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were separated from us, that nothing we had to offer could aid.

I soon learned that my most crucial role as a mother was first to survive, and then to support her in managing the powerful sentiments caused by the impossibility of my protecting her from all unease. As she enhanced her skill to ingest and absorb milk, she also had to develop a capacity to manage her sentiments and her suffering when the nourishment was delayed, or when she was in pain, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to evolve with her (and my) frustration, rage, despair, loathing, discontent, need. My job was not to ensure everything was perfect, but to assist in finding significance to her emotional experience of things not going so well.

This was the difference, for her, between experiencing someone who was attempting to provide her only good feelings, and instead being helped to grow a ability to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the difference, for me, between desiring to experience wonderful about performing flawlessly as a perfect mother, and instead building the ability to accept my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a adequately performed – and comprehend my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The distinction between my trying to stop her crying, and recognizing when she required to weep.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel reduced the wish to hit “undo” and alter our history into one where everything goes well. I find faith in my awareness of a skill evolving internally to acknowledge that this is impossible, and to realize that, when I’m occupied with attempting to reschedule a vacation, what I really need is to cry.