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I trust your a pleasant summer: my experience was different. The very day we were planning to take a vacation, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which resulted in our vacation arrangements had to be cancelled.

From this experience I gained insight important, all over again, about how hard it is for me to acknowledge pain when things don't work out. I’m not talking about major catastrophes, but the more common, quietly devastating disappointments that – without the ability to actually experience them – will significantly depress us.

When we were meant to be on holiday but were not, I kept experiencing a pull 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 remained low, just a bit blue. And then I would bump up against the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery necessitated frequent uncomfortable wound care, and there is a finite opportunity for an pleasant vacation on the shores of Belgium. So, no getaway. Just letdown and irritation, suffering and attention.

I know more serious issues can happen, it’s only a holiday, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I tested that argument too. But what I required was to be truthful to myself. In those instances when I was able to stop fighting off the disappointment and we discussed it instead, it felt like we were facing it as a team. Instead of being down and trying to appear happy, I’ve given myself permission all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and loathing and fury, which at least felt real. At times, it even became possible to enjoy our time at home together.

This recalled of a desire I sometimes see in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also experienced in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could in some way undo our negative events, like hitting a reverse switch. But that button only looks to the past. Confronting the reality that this is not possible and embracing the pain and fury for things not working out how we expected, rather than a insincere positive spin, can promote a transformation: from avoidance and sadness, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it needs duration – this can be life-changing.

We think of depression as experiencing negativity – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a repressing of anger and sadness and frustration and delight and energy, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of honest emotional expression and liberty.

I have repeatedly found myself trapped in this desire to erase events, 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 baby. Not only the nourishing – sometimes for over an hour at a time, and then again under 60 minutes after that – and not only the changing, and then the changing again before you’ve even completed the change you were doing. 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 sleep deprivation – were the emotional demands.

I had assumed my most primary duty as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon realized that it was unfeasible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her craving could seem insatiable; my supply could not come fast enough, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she despised being changed, and cried as if she were falling into a gloomy abyss of despair. And while sometimes she seemed consoled by the embraces we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were separated from us, that no solution we provided could aid.

I soon learned that my most crucial role as a mother was first to persevere, and then to assist her process the overwhelming feelings caused by the unattainability of my guarding her from all discomfort. As she grew her ability to take in and digest milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to digest her emotions and her pain when the milk didn’t come, or when she was in pain, or any other hard and bewildering experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) annoyance, fury, despondency, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to guarantee smooth experiences, but to help bring meaning to her sentimental path of things not going so well.

This was the difference, for her, between experiencing someone who was trying to give her only positive emotions, and instead being helped to grow a capacity to experience all feelings. It was the distinction, for me, between aiming to have excellent about executing ideally as a perfect mother, and instead building the ability to endure my own shortcomings in order to do a good enough job – and comprehend my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The difference between my attempting to halt her crying, and recognizing when she required to weep.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel not as strongly the wish to press reverse and change our narrative into one where everything goes well. I find hope in my sense of a ability developing within to recognise that this is unattainable, and to comprehend that, when I’m occupied with attempting to reschedule a vacation, what I actually want is to sob.