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I trust your a pleasant summer: I did not. The very day we were supposed to be take a vacation, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, expecting him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which meant our getaway ideas were forced to be cancelled.

From this episode 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, subtly crushing disappointments that – without the ability to actually experience them – will truly burden us.

When we were expected to be on holiday but could not be, I kept experiencing a pull towards finding the positive: “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 never felt better, just a bit depressed. And then I would face the reality that this holiday had truly vanished: my husband’s surgery involved frequent uncomfortable wound care, and there is a limited time window for an enjoyable break on the Belgian coast. So, no getaway. Just discontent and annoyance, suffering and attention.

I know worse things can happen, it's just a trip, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I used that reasoning too. But what I needed was to be truthful to myself. In those times 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 put on a brave face, I’ve granted myself all sorts of unpleasant emotions, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and aversion and wrath, which at least seemed authentic. At times, it even turned out to enjoy our time at home together.

This reminded me of a desire I sometimes see in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also seen in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could perhaps erase our difficult moments, like pressing a reset button. But that option only looks to the past. Acknowledging the reality that this is impossible and allowing the pain and fury for things not turning out how we expected, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can enable a shift: from denial and depression, to development and opportunity. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be life-changing.

We think of depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a pressing down 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 repeatedly found myself stuck in this wish to reverse things, but my little one is helping me to grow out of it. As a first-time mom, I was at times burdened by the amazing requirements of my newborn. Not only the nursing – sometimes for over an hour at a time, and then again under 60 minutes after that – and not only the diaper swaps, and then the changing again before you’ve even ended the swap you were doing. These routine valuable duties among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a solace and a significant blessing. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What shocked me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the emotional demands.

I had believed my most important job as a mother was to fulfill my infant's requirements. But I soon understood that it was not possible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her appetite could seem insatiable; my milk could not come fast enough, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to alter her clothes – but she despised being changed, and sobbed as if she were plunging into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed comforted 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 realized 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 unattainability of my protecting her from all discomfort. As she grew her ability to consume and process milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to digest her emotions and her distress when the nourishment was delayed, or when she was suffering, or any other challenging and perplexing experience – and I had to evolve with her (and my) irritation, anger, hopelessness, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to guarantee smooth experiences, but to support in creating understanding to her emotional experience of things not working out ideally.

This was the difference, for her, between having someone who was attempting to provide her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being assisted in developing a capacity to feel every emotion. It was the distinction, for me, between aiming to have great about performing flawlessly as a perfect mother, and instead developing the capacity to endure my own imperfections in order to do a adequately performed – and comprehend my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The distinction between my seeking to prevent her crying, and recognizing 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 skill growing inside me to recognise that this is impossible, and to understand that, when I’m occupied with attempting to rearrange a trip, what I actually want is to weep.