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I trust your a good summer: mine was not. That day we were supposed to be travel for leisure, I was waiting at A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have prompt but common surgery, which resulted in our travel plans had to be cancelled.

From this situation I realized a truth significant, 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 experience them – will significantly depress us.

When we were supposed to be on holiday but were not, 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 didn't improve, just a bit depressed. And then I would bump up against the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery involved frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a limited time window for an pleasant vacation on the shores of Belgium. So, no getaway. Just disappointment and frustration, pain and care.

I know worse things can happen, it's merely a vacation, what a privileged problem to have – I know because I tested that argument too. But what I wanted was to be truthful to myself. In those moments when I was able to halt battling the disappointment and we addressed it instead, it felt like we were going through something together. Instead of being down and trying to smile, I’ve granted myself all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to anger and frustration and loathing and fury, which at least seemed authentic. At times, it even turned out to value our days at home together.

This reminded me of a wish I sometimes see in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could in some way erase our difficult moments, like hitting a reverse switch. But that arrow only looks to the past. Confronting the reality that this is impossible and accepting the sorrow and anger for things not turning out how we hoped, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can promote a transformation: from rejection and low mood, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be life-changing.

We consider depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of dulling of all emotions, a repressing of anger and sadness and disappointment and joy and energy, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but acknowledging every sentiment, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and liberty.

I have repeatedly found myself trapped in this desire to reverse things, but my toddler is supporting my evolution. As a first-time mom, I was at times swamped by the astonishing demands of my baby. Not only the nourishing – sometimes for over an hour at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the changing, and then the repeating the process before you’ve even ended the task you were changing. These routine valuable duties among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a solace and a significant blessing. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What shocked me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the emotional demands.

I had assumed my most key role as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon understood that it was impossible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her appetite could seem insatiable; my nourishment could not arrive quickly, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to change her – but she disliked being changed, and sobbed as if she were plunging into a shadowy pit of misery. And while sometimes she seemed consoled by the hugs we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were distant from us, that no solution we provided could assist.

I soon discovered that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to endure, and then to assist her process the overwhelming feelings triggered by the impossibility of my protecting her from all distress. As she grew her ability to ingest and absorb milk, she also had to develop a capacity to manage her sentiments and her pain when the nourishment was delayed, 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, loathing, discontent, need. My job was not to guarantee smooth experiences, but to help bring meaning to her emotional experience of things being less than perfect.

This was the contrast, for her, between having someone who was seeking to offer her only good feelings, and instead being helped to grow a capacity to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the difference, for me, between desiring to experience wonderful about performing flawlessly 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 disappointment and anger with me. The contrast between my seeking to prevent her crying, and comprehending when she needed to cry.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel less keenly the desire to press reverse and change our narrative into one where all is perfect. I find hope in my awareness of a ability growing inside me to recognise that this is unattainable, and to comprehend that, when I’m focused on striving to reschedule a vacation, what I actually want is to sob.