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I wish you enjoyed a enjoyable summer: my experience was different. On the day we were planning to take a vacation, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have urgent but routine surgery, which meant our vacation arrangements had to be cancelled.

From this episode I realized a truth important, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to feel bad when things don't work out. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more routine, quietly devastating disappointments that – if we don't actually experience them – will truly burden us.

When we were expected to be on holiday but were not, I kept sensing an urge 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 didn't improve, 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 relaxing trip on the shores of Belgium. So, no vacation. Just letdown and irritation, suffering and attention.

I know more serious issues can happen, it's merely a vacation, what a privileged problem 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 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 unwanted feelings, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and hatred and rage, which at least felt real. At times, it even became possible 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 experienced in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could perhaps erase our difficult moments, like hitting a reverse switch. But that arrow only goes in reverse. Facing the reality that this is impossible and accepting the grief and rage for things not turning out how we expected, rather than a insincere positive spin, can enable a shift: from avoidance and sadness, to development and opportunity. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be life-changing.

We consider depression as experiencing negativity – but to my mind it’s a kind of deadening of all emotions, a suppressing of anger and sadness and letdown and happiness and vitality, and all the rest. The substitute for depression is not happiness, but acknowledging every sentiment, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and freedom.

I have repeatedly found myself stuck in this wish to erase events, but my little one is assisting me in moving past it. As a new mother, I was at times burdened by the amazing requirements of my newborn. Not only the feeding – sometimes for a lengthy period at a time, and then again less than an hour after that – and not only the outfit alterations, and then the changing again before you’ve even finished the task you were doing. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a reassurance and a tremendous privilege. Though they’re also, at moments, persistent and tiring. 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 meet my baby’s needs. But I soon realized that it was unfeasible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her appetite could seem unmeetable; my milk 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 plunging into a shadowy pit of misery. And while sometimes she seemed comforted by the embraces we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were separated from us, that no solution we provided could assist.

I soon learned that my most crucial role as a mother was first to endure, and then to support her in managing the overwhelming feelings provoked by the infeasibility 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 suffering when the nourishment was delayed, or when she was hurting, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to develop alongside her (and my) irritation, anger, hopelessness, loathing, discontent, need. My job was not to make things go well, but to help bring meaning to her emotional experience of things being less than perfect.

This was the difference, for her, between experiencing someone who was trying to give her only good feelings, and instead being supported in building a ability to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the difference, for me, between aiming to have wonderful about executing ideally as a flawless caregiver, and instead developing the capacity to accept my own imperfections in order to do a adequately performed – and grasp my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The difference between my attempting to halt her crying, and comprehending when she had to sob.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel not as strongly the desire to hit “undo” and change our narrative into one where everything goes well. I find optimism in my awareness of a capacity growing inside me to acknowledge that this is not possible, and to understand that, when I’m occupied with attempting to rearrange a trip, what I really need is to sob.