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I trust your a enjoyable summer: my experience was different. On the day we were scheduled to go on holiday, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have urgent but routine surgery, which resulted in our vacation arrangements needed to be cancelled.

From this situation I learned something valuable, all over again, about how hard it is for me to acknowledge pain when things go wrong. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more everyday, quietly devastating disappointments that – without the ability to actually acknowledge them – will truly burden us.

When we were expected to be on holiday but were not, I kept feeling a tug 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 remained low, just a bit depressed. And then I would face the reality that this holiday had truly vanished: my husband’s surgery necessitated frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a short period for an pleasant vacation on the shores of Belgium. So, no vacation. Just discontent and annoyance, suffering and attention.

I know more serious issues can happen, it’s only a holiday, what a privileged problem to have – I know because I tested that argument too. But what I required was to be truthful to myself. In those times when I was able to cease resisting the disappointment and we addressed it instead, it felt like we were facing it as a team. Instead of feeling depressed and trying to smile, I’ve granted myself all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and aversion and wrath, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even became possible to appreciate our moments at home together.

This reminded me of a wish I sometimes see in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also seen in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could in some way erase our difficult moments, like pressing a reset button. But that button only points backwards. Acknowledging the reality that this is unattainable and embracing the sorrow and anger for things not happening how we anticipated, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can enable a shift: from denial and depression, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be profoundly impactful.

We think of depression as experiencing negativity – but to my mind it’s a kind of dulling of all emotions, a repressing of anger and sadness and letdown and happiness and energy, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and release.

I have often found myself trapped in this desire 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 astonishing demands of my newborn. Not only the feeding – sometimes for a lengthy period at a time, and then again under 60 minutes after that – and not only the diaper swaps, and then the doing it once more before you’ve even ended the task you were handling. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a comfort and a tremendous privilege. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What shocked me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the feelings requirements.

I had assumed my most key role as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon came to realise that it was unfeasible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her hunger could seem unmeetable; my milk could not arrive quickly, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she disliked being changed, and cried as if she were plunging into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed comforted by the hugs we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were lost to us, that nothing we had to offer could assist.

I soon realized that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to survive, and then to help her digest the overwhelming feelings triggered by the infeasibility of my protecting her from all distress. As she developed her capacity to ingest and absorb milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to digest her emotions and her distress when the milk didn’t come, or when she was hurting, or any other challenging and perplexing experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) annoyance, fury, despondency, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to ensure everything was perfect, but to assist in finding significance to her sentimental path of things being less than perfect.

This was the difference, for her, between being with someone who was seeking to offer her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being assisted in developing a skill to experience all feelings. It was the contrast, for me, between aiming to have excellent about performing flawlessly as a flawless caregiver, and instead cultivating the skill to endure my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a adequately performed – and understand my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The difference between my seeking to prevent her crying, and recognizing when she had to sob.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel reduced the wish to press reverse and alter our history into one where everything goes well. I find hope in my feeling of a ability evolving internally to recognise that this is impossible, and to comprehend that, when I’m occupied with attempting to reschedule a vacation, what I really need is to weep.