It’s a cloudy Sunday afternoon, and I find myself in my office staring at the turmoil outside its large window. Staring back at me are the frail leaves just waiting to fall from their trees. The winds howl as if they cannot wait to yank down the leaves. Tonight will be stormy.
Haruki Murakami has this excellent paragraph about storms:
And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in.
If such is true, my self who is writing this blog post is not the same person I was last week. The week was a storm for my family.
Last Tuesday, my son woke up on the floor next to his bed, the bed covered in his own vomit. That marked the first stomach flu of our 14 months boy. The next day came his diarrhea, and then a fever that lasted until Friday. On Thursday, when he was 103.9F, my wife and I took him to urgent care. Fortunately, a doctor assured us everything is fine and sent us home, and indeed, the next day his fever was gone. The unfortunate part is that his flu spread into my wife and me, so now both of us must care for ourselves, all while helping our baby recover.
All events swept through us like a storm. We were exhausted. When our son fell asleep, we slept, hoping to regain some strengths so that we could continue to care for him when he wakes up. There is no time to feel scared or sad that our baby was suffering. There is no time to reflect our experience. There’s barely time to recharge enough energy to get us to the next rest. Like we are in a storm.
Storms are messy. They splash us with not only the frosting rain but also the freezing, loud winds. In our storm, apart from our son’s sickness and our own exhaustion, I kept hearing a cacophonous noise from another world that made me very upset.
But for some reasons that I could only describe as a miracle, I did not snap. Throughout the week, not once did I get angry at my wife or my son (I have an anger management problem under stress). I did feel sad; I did feel tired; at times I was not fully present wherever I was; but I did not, for once, let anger take the better part of me.
Instead, when I had some seconds for emotions to rush into my brain, the top emotion was how much I appreciate my wife. I would look at her and thank God she was there. I don’t know what my son and I have done to deserve the care and love from such a resilient and strong woman.
Today, my son no longer has vomits, diarrhea, or fevers. My wife and I, while both exhausted, are on our paths to recover. I sure don’t “remember how we made it through”, and I am too afraid to contemplate “whether the storm is really over”, but I know one thing: my wife and I have become a different version of ourselves after the challenging week. A better version.
I am optimistic about our next days. After storms come rainbows.