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I trust your a enjoyable summer: I did not. The very day we were supposed to be take a vacation, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have urgent but routine surgery, which resulted in our vacation arrangements had to be cancelled.

From this episode I gained insight significant, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to acknowledge pain when things go wrong. I’m not talking about major catastrophes, but the more routine, subtly crushing disappointments that – without the ability to actually acknowledge them – will truly burden 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 was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery required frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a finite opportunity for an relaxing trip on the Belgium's beaches. So, no holiday. Just disappointment and frustration, suffering and attention.

I know graver situations can happen, it's merely a vacation, 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 cease resisting the disappointment and we discussed it instead, it felt like we were sharing an experience. Instead of feeling depressed and trying to put on a brave face, I’ve granted myself all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and aversion and wrath, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even became possible to appreciate our moments at home together.

This brought to mind of a wish I sometimes see in my therapy clients, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could perhaps undo our negative events, like clicking “undo”. But that arrow only points backwards. Facing the reality that this is not possible and accepting the pain and fury for things not happening how we hoped, rather than a false optimism, can enable a shift: from denial and depression, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be transformative.

We consider depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of dulling of all emotions, a suppressing of rage and grief and disappointment and joy and energy, and all the rest. The substitute for depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and freedom.

I have frequently found myself stuck in this desire to reverse things, but my little one is helping me to grow out of it. As a new mother, I was at times overwhelmed by the amazing requirements of my newborn. Not only the nourishing – sometimes for a lengthy period at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the diaper swaps, and then the changing again 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 comfort and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What surprised me the most – aside from the sleep deprivation – were the psychological needs.

I had believed my most key role as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon realized that it was not possible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her appetite could seem endless; my milk could not come fast enough, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she despised being changed, and cried as if she were falling into a shadowy pit of misery. 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 comfort we gave could assist.

I soon discovered that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to persevere, and then to help her digest the overwhelming feelings caused by the infeasibility of my shielding her from all distress. As she developed her capacity to ingest and absorb milk, she also had to develop a capacity to process her feelings and her pain when the milk didn’t come, or when she was in pain, or any other hard and bewildering experience – and I had to evolve with her (and my) irritation, anger, hopelessness, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to make things go well, but to support in creating understanding to her feelings journey of things being less than perfect.

This was the distinction, for her, between being with 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 distinction, for me, between wanting to feel excellent about performing flawlessly as a ideal parent, and instead building the ability to accept my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a good enough job – and grasp my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The difference between my attempting to halt her crying, and comprehending when she needed to cry.

Now that we have developed beyond this together, I feel not as strongly the wish to click erase and change our narrative into one where all is perfect. I find hope in my awareness of a skill evolving internally to recognise that this is unattainable, and to comprehend that, when I’m busy trying to reschedule a vacation, what I really need is to weep.