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I trust your a enjoyable summer: mine was not. The very day we were scheduled to go on holiday, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which meant our getaway ideas needed to be cancelled.

From this episode I realized a truth significant, all over again, about how hard it is for me to feel bad when things take a turn. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more everyday, subtly crushing disappointments that – if we don't actually feel them – will significantly depress us.

When we were meant to be on holiday but weren't, I kept feeling a tug towards seeking optimism: “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 down. And then I would bump up against the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery required frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a finite opportunity for an pleasant vacation on the shores of Belgium. So, no holiday. Just discontent and annoyance, hurt and nurturing.

I know worse things can happen, it's merely a vacation, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I used that reasoning too. But what I wanted was to be truthful to myself. In those moments 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 experiencing sadness and trying to smile, I’ve granted myself all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and hatred and rage, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even turned out to value our days at home together.

This recalled of a desire I sometimes notice in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also seen in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could somehow reverse our unwanted experiences, like clicking “undo”. But that arrow only points backwards. Facing the reality that this is impossible and embracing the grief and rage for things not working out how we hoped, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can enable a shift: from avoidance and sadness, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be transformative.

We consider depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a suppressing of rage and grief and disappointment and joy and energy, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and release.

I have repeatedly found myself caught in this desire to reverse things, but my little one is supporting my evolution. As a new mother, I was at times overwhelmed by the amazing requirements of my baby. Not only the feeding – sometimes for more than 60 minutes at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the diaper swaps, and then the doing it once more before you’ve even completed the task you were changing. These routine valuable duties 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 surprised me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the psychological needs.

I had believed my most key role as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon realized that it was impossible to meet all of my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her hunger could seem insatiable; my nourishment could not arrive quickly, or it came too fast. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she despised being changed, and sobbed as if she were descending into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed consoled by the cuddles we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were distant from us, that nothing we had to offer could help.

I soon learned that my most important job as a mother was first to endure, and then to help her digest the powerful sentiments triggered by the unattainability of my guarding her from all discomfort. As she developed her capacity to take in and digest milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to manage her sentiments and her pain when the supply was insufficient, or when she was in pain, or any other difficult and confusing 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 feelings journey of things not working out ideally.

This was the contrast, for her, between being with someone who was attempting to provide her only positive emotions, and instead being assisted in developing a capacity to feel every emotion. It was the contrast, for me, between desiring to experience wonderful about doing a perfect job as a ideal parent, and instead cultivating the skill to accept my own shortcomings in order to do a good enough job – and grasp my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The difference between my trying to stop her crying, and recognizing when she required to weep.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel reduced the wish to hit “undo” and rewrite our story into one where things are ideal. I find hope in my feeling of a skill growing inside me to recognise that this is unattainable, and to comprehend that, when I’m busy trying to rebook a holiday, what I truly require is to cry.