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I trust your a good summer: I did not. The very day we were scheduled to go on holiday, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have urgent but routine surgery, which caused our vacation arrangements needed to be cancelled.

From this experience I gained insight valuable, all over again, about how hard it is for me to acknowledge pain when things go wrong. I’m not talking about major catastrophes, but the more routine, quietly devastating disappointments that – unless we can actually acknowledge them – will truly burden us.

When we were expected 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 bump up against the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery necessitated frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a finite opportunity for an enjoyable break on the Belgian coast. So, no holiday. Just letdown and irritation, hurt and nurturing.

I know worse things can happen, it’s only a holiday, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I tried that line too. But what I wanted was to be truthful to myself. In those instances when I was able to cease resisting the disappointment and we discussed it instead, it felt like we were going through something together. Instead of experiencing sadness and trying to put on a brave face, I’ve given myself permission all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to anger and frustration and aversion and wrath, which at least seemed authentic. At times, it even was feasible to enjoy our time at home together.

This brought to mind of a wish I sometimes notice in my therapy clients, and that I have also seen in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could perhaps undo our negative events, like clicking “undo”. But that option only looks to the past. Facing the reality that this is not possible and accepting the grief and rage for things not working out how we anticipated, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can facilitate a change of current: from rejection and low mood, to development and opportunity. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be profoundly impactful.

We view depression as experiencing negativity – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a repressing of rage and grief and letdown and happiness and energy, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of honest emotional expression and release.

I have frequently found myself trapped in this desire to reverse things, but my young child is helping me to grow out of it. As a new mother, I was at times burdened by the astonishing demands of my baby. Not only the nursing – sometimes for more than 60 minutes at a time, and then again under 60 minutes after that – and not only the outfit alterations, and then the repeating the process before you’ve even finished the swap you were changing. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – efficiency blended with affection – 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 feelings requirements.

I had assumed my most primary duty as a mother was to fulfill my infant's requirements. But I soon realized that it was impossible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her hunger could seem unmeetable; my milk could not arrive quickly, or it came too fast. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she hated being changed, and sobbed 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 distant from us, that no comfort we gave could help.

I soon discovered that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to survive, and then to help her digest the intense emotions caused by the infeasibility of my shielding her from all distress. As she enhanced her skill to take in and digest milk, she also had to build an ability to manage her sentiments and her suffering when the nourishment was delayed, or when she was hurting, or any other hard and bewildering experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) irritation, anger, hopelessness, loathing, discontent, need. My job was not to ensure everything was perfect, but to assist in finding significance to her feelings journey of things not going so well.

This was the contrast, for her, between experiencing someone who was seeking to offer her only positive emotions, and instead being helped to grow a capacity to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the difference, for me, between desiring to experience excellent about performing flawlessly as a flawless caregiver, and instead building the ability to accept my own imperfections in order to do a good enough job – and comprehend my daughter’s letdown and frustration with me. The distinction between my seeking to prevent her crying, and recognizing when she had to sob.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel not as strongly the wish to hit “undo” and rewrite our story into one where things are ideal. I find hope in my sense of a skill growing inside me to recognise that this is impossible, and to understand that, when I’m busy trying to reschedule a vacation, what I truly require is to weep.