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I wish you enjoyed a enjoyable summer: I did not. On the day we were scheduled to go on holiday, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which resulted in our travel plans were forced to be cancelled.

From this situation I gained insight significant, all over again, about how hard it is for me to acknowledge pain when things take a turn. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more routine, gently heartbreaking disappointments that – if we don't actually feel them – will significantly depress us.

When we were supposed to be on holiday but could not be, I kept feeling a tug 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 blue. And then I would bump up against the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery involved frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a limited time window for an relaxing trip on the Belgian coast. So, no vacation. Just letdown and irritation, suffering and attention.

I know worse things can happen, it's just a trip, 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 facing it as a team. Instead of experiencing sadness and trying to smile, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of unpleasant emotions, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and hatred and rage, which at least seemed authentic. At times, it even turned out to enjoy our time at home together.

This recalled of a hope I sometimes observe in my therapy clients, and that I have also seen in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could in some way reverse our unwanted experiences, like clicking “undo”. But that option only goes in reverse. Acknowledging the reality that this is impossible and accepting the grief and rage for things not turning out how we anticipated, 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 requires patience – this can be profoundly impactful.

We think of depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of deadening of all emotions, a suppressing of anger and sadness and frustration and delight and energy, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but acknowledging every sentiment, a kind of honest emotional expression and liberty.

I have often found myself trapped in this urge to erase events, but my little one is assisting me in moving past it. As a first-time mom, I was at times burdened by the incredible needs of my newborn. Not only the nursing – sometimes for more than 60 minutes at a time, and then again less than an hour after that – and not only the changing, and then the changing again before you’ve even finished the swap you were changing. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a solace and a significant blessing. Though they’re also, at moments, unceasing and exhausting. What astounded me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the psychological needs.

I had thought my most important job as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon came to realise that it was not possible to meet all of my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her hunger could seem insatiable; my supply could not be produced rapidly, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she disliked being changed, and wept as if she were plunging into a shadowy pit of misery. 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 help.

I soon realized that my most crucial role as a mother was first to endure, and then to help her digest the powerful sentiments caused by the impossibility of my shielding her from all discomfort. As she enhanced her skill to consume and process milk, she also had to develop a capacity to manage her sentiments and her pain when the milk didn’t come, or when she was hurting, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to grow through 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 not going so well.

This was the distinction, for her, between being with someone who was attempting to provide her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being supported in building a skill to feel every emotion. It was the contrast, for me, between desiring to experience wonderful about performing flawlessly as a flawless caregiver, and instead building the ability to accept my own shortcomings in order to do a good enough job – and understand my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The difference between my attempting to halt her crying, and comprehending when she needed to cry.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel not as strongly the urge to press reverse and rewrite our story into one where everything goes well. I find hope in my sense of a capacity developing within to recognise that this is not possible, and to understand that, when I’m focused on striving to rearrange a trip, what I actually want is to cry.