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I trust your a pleasant summer: my experience was different. That day we were scheduled to go on holiday, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, expecting him to have urgent but routine surgery, which caused our vacation arrangements needed to be cancelled.

From this experience I gained insight valuable, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to acknowledge pain when things take a turn. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more routine, gently heartbreaking disappointments that – without the ability to actually feel them – will truly burden us.

When we were expected to be on holiday but could not be, I kept feeling a tug 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 never felt better, just a bit down. And then I would bump up against the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery involved frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a short period for an enjoyable break on the shores of Belgium. So, no vacation. Just discontent and annoyance, 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 tried that line too. But what I required was to be honest with myself. In those times when I was able to stop fighting off 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 unwanted feelings, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and loathing and fury, which at least seemed authentic. At times, it even was feasible to enjoy our time at home together.

This brought to mind of a wish I sometimes see in my counseling individuals, and that I have also seen in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could in some way undo our negative events, like clicking “undo”. But that arrow only looks to the past. Facing the reality that this is impossible and allowing the pain and fury 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 progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be transformative.

We consider depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of deadening of all emotions, a pressing down of frustration and sorrow and letdown and happiness and vitality, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and freedom.

I have frequently found myself caught in this wish to reverse things, but my toddler is assisting me in moving past it. As a first-time mom, I was at times swamped by the astonishing demands of my baby. Not only the nursing – sometimes for a lengthy period at a time, and then again under 60 minutes after that – and not only the diaper swaps, and then the changing again before you’ve even completed the change you were handling. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a solace and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, persistent and tiring. What surprised me the most – aside from the sleep deprivation – were the emotional demands.

I had thought my most key role as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon understood that it was impossible to meet all of my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her appetite could seem insatiable; my milk could not be produced rapidly, or it came too fast. And then we needed to alter her clothes – but she hated being changed, and sobbed as if she were descending 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 lost to us, that no comfort we gave could help.

I soon discovered that my most crucial role as a mother was first to survive, and then to support her in managing the overwhelming feelings provoked by the infeasibility of my shielding her from all unease. As she developed her capacity to ingest and absorb milk, she also had to build an ability to digest her emotions and her distress when the nourishment was delayed, or when she was hurting, or any other hard and bewildering experience – and I had to develop alongside her (and my) irritation, anger, hopelessness, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to guarantee smooth experiences, but to assist in finding significance to her feelings journey of things being less than perfect.

This was the distinction, for her, between experiencing someone who was trying to give her only good feelings, and instead being helped to grow a skill to feel every emotion. It was the distinction, for me, between wanting to feel wonderful about performing flawlessly as a perfect mother, and instead developing the capacity to tolerate my own shortcomings in order to do a adequately performed – and grasp my daughter’s letdown and frustration with me. The contrast between my seeking to prevent her crying, and understanding when she had to sob.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel not as strongly the desire to press reverse and change our narrative into one where things are ideal. I find faith in my sense of a skill growing inside me to acknowledge that this is unattainable, and to realize that, when I’m busy trying to rearrange a trip, what I truly require is to sob.