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I hope you had a enjoyable summer: I did not. On the day we were supposed to be go on holiday, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which resulted in our travel plans were forced to be cancelled.

From this situation I learned something important, all over again, about how hard it is for me to experience sadness when things don't work out. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more common, subtly crushing disappointments that – unless we can actually acknowledge them – will really weigh us down.

When we were expected 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 never felt better, 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 relaxing trip on the Belgium's beaches. So, no vacation. Just letdown and irritation, hurt and nurturing.

I know worse things can happen, it's merely a vacation, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I tested that argument too. But what I required was to be sincere with my feelings. In those moments when I was able to cease resisting the disappointment and we addressed it instead, it felt like we were facing it as a team. Instead of experiencing sadness and trying to put on a brave face, I’ve given myself permission all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and hatred and rage, which at least felt real. At times, it even turned out to value our days at home together.

This brought to mind of a wish I sometimes observe in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a individual in analysis: 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 embracing the grief and rage for things not working out how we anticipated, rather than a false optimism, can facilitate a change of current: from denial and depression, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be profoundly impactful.

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 disappointment and joy and life force, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but acknowledging every sentiment, a kind of honest emotional expression and freedom.

I have often found myself stuck in this desire to erase events, but my little one is helping me to grow out of it. As a recent parent, I was at times overwhelmed by the amazing requirements of my newborn. Not only the nourishing – sometimes for over an hour at a time, and then again less than an hour after that – and not only the outfit alterations, and then the repeating the process before you’ve even completed the change you were changing. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a comfort and a significant blessing. Though they’re also, at moments, unceasing and exhausting. 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 impossible to meet all of my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her hunger could seem endless; my milk could not be produced rapidly, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to swap her diaper – 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 distant from us, that no comfort we gave 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 intense emotions triggered by the infeasibility of my shielding her from all discomfort. As she developed her capacity to take in and digest milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to digest her emotions and her distress when the milk didn’t come, or when she was in pain, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to grow through 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 emotional experience of things being less than perfect.

This was the distinction, for her, between being with someone who was attempting to provide her only good feelings, and instead being helped to grow a skill to experience all feelings. It was the contrast, for me, between wanting to feel great about executing ideally as a ideal parent, and instead cultivating the skill to endure my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a sufficiently well – and understand my daughter’s letdown and frustration with me. The difference between my trying to stop her crying, and comprehending when she needed to cry.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel not as strongly the urge to click erase and change our narrative into one where everything goes well. I find hope in my sense of a ability growing inside me to recognise that this is not possible, and to comprehend that, when I’m occupied with attempting to reschedule a vacation, what I really need is to cry.