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I trust your a enjoyable summer: I did not. That day we were planning to travel for leisure, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, expecting him to have urgent but routine surgery, which resulted in our getaway ideas needed to be cancelled.

From this experience I gained insight important, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to acknowledge pain when things go wrong. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more routine, quietly devastating disappointments that – if we don't actually acknowledge them – will really weigh us down.

When we were meant 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 never felt better, just a bit depressed. And then I would bump up against the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery necessitated frequent uncomfortable wound care, and there is a limited time window for an pleasant vacation on the shores of Belgium. So, no holiday. Just letdown and irritation, suffering and attention.

I know worse things can happen, it's just a trip, such a fortunate concern to have – I know because I used that reasoning 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 going through something together. Instead of feeling depressed and trying to appear happy, I’ve granted myself all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and hatred and rage, which at least felt real. At times, it even became possible to enjoy our time at home together.

This reminded me 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 reverse our unwanted experiences, like hitting a reverse switch. But that arrow only points backwards. Confronting 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 does take time – this can be life-changing.

We think of depression as experiencing negativity – but to my mind it’s a kind of dulling of all emotions, a suppressing of anger and sadness and disappointment and joy and vitality, and all the rest. The substitute for depression is not happiness, but acknowledging every sentiment, a kind of honest emotional expression and liberty.

I have repeatedly found myself trapped in this desire to click “undo”, but my toddler is assisting me in moving past it. As a recent parent, I was at times overwhelmed by the astonishing demands of my infant. Not only the feeding – 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 completed the swap you were handling. These everyday important activities among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a comfort and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What astounded me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the psychological needs.

I had believed my most primary duty as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. But I soon realized that it was not possible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her hunger could seem insatiable; my nourishment could not arrive quickly, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to alter her clothes – but she hated being changed, and sobbed as if she were descending into a shadowy pit of misery. And while sometimes she seemed soothed by the embraces we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were lost to us, that no comfort we gave could assist.

I soon learned that my most crucial role as a mother was first to survive, and then to assist her process the intense emotions caused by the impossibility of my guarding her from all distress. As she enhanced her skill to take in and digest milk, she also had to develop a capacity to manage her sentiments and her suffering when the nourishment was delayed, or when she was in pain, or any other hard and bewildering experience – and I had to develop alongside her (and my) annoyance, fury, despondency, loathing, discontent, need. My job was not to make things go well, but to help bring meaning to her feelings journey of things not working out ideally.

This was the distinction, for her, between having someone who was seeking to offer her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being supported in building a skill to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the difference, for me, between aiming to have wonderful about performing flawlessly as a flawless caregiver, and instead building the ability to accept my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a sufficiently well – and grasp my daughter’s letdown and frustration with me. The distinction between my trying to stop her crying, and recognizing when she needed to cry.

Now that we have developed beyond this together, I feel reduced the desire to click erase and alter our history into one where things are ideal. I find hope in my feeling of a skill growing inside me to recognise that this is impossible, and to realize that, when I’m busy trying to reschedule a vacation, what I actually want is to cry.