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I wish you enjoyed a pleasant summer: mine was not. That day we were supposed to be go on holiday, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, expecting him to have prompt but common surgery, which meant our vacation arrangements had to be cancelled.

From this experience I learned something significant, 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 common, subtly crushing disappointments that – unless we can actually experience them – will significantly depress us.

When we were expected to be on holiday but were not, I kept sensing an urge 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 didn't improve, just a bit blue. And then I would confront the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery required frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a limited time window for an enjoyable break on the Belgian coast. So, no vacation. Just discontent and annoyance, suffering and attention.

I know worse things can happen, it’s only a holiday, 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 instances when I was able to halt battling the disappointment and we addressed it instead, it felt like we were facing it as a team. Instead of being down and trying to smile, I’ve given myself permission all sorts of unpleasant emotions, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and hatred and rage, which at least seemed authentic. At times, it even turned out to appreciate our moments at home together.

This brought to mind of a hope I sometimes see in my therapy clients, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could somehow undo our negative events, like hitting a reverse switch. But that arrow only points backwards. Facing the reality that this is not possible and allowing the pain and fury for things not working out how we hoped, rather than a insincere positive spin, can promote a transformation: from denial and depression, to development and opportunity. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be life-changing.

We think of depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of dulling of all emotions, a repressing of rage and grief and letdown and happiness and vitality, 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 frequently found myself caught in this desire to reverse things, but my young child is helping me to grow out of it. As a recent parent, I was at times burdened by the incredible needs of my newborn. Not only the nourishing – 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 changing again before you’ve even completed the task you were changing. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a solace 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 emotional demands.

I had thought my most key role as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon came to realise that it was impossible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her appetite could seem endless; my supply could not be produced rapidly, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to alter her clothes – 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 hugs we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were separated from us, that no comfort we gave could aid.

I soon learned that my most crucial role as a mother was first to survive, and then to assist her process the overwhelming feelings provoked by the infeasibility of my protecting her from all discomfort. As she enhanced her skill to take in and digest milk, she also had to build an ability to process her feelings 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 evolve with her (and my) irritation, anger, hopelessness, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to ensure everything was perfect, but to assist in finding significance to her feelings journey of things being less than perfect.

This was the difference, for her, between having someone who was trying to give her only good feelings, and instead being helped to grow a capacity to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the distinction, for me, between desiring to experience excellent about doing a perfect job as a ideal parent, and instead cultivating the skill to tolerate my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a adequately performed – and grasp my daughter’s letdown and frustration with me. The distinction between my attempting to halt her crying, and recognizing when she needed to cry.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel less keenly the desire to click erase and change our narrative into one where everything goes well. I find faith in my sense of a capacity growing inside me to recognise that this is unattainable, and to realize that, when I’m busy trying to reschedule a vacation, what I actually want is to cry.