I stumbled downstairs this morning and through bleary eyes noted that the hydrangea I’d bought Monday, the one sitting in the kitchen window, was already dying. Its purple-blue blooms were dry and brown on the edges. After two days.

Fitting, I thought, after the day and night we’d had.

On Monday, The Kid and I had wandered happily around Trader Joe’s, a week of improvement under our belts. The plants stood out to me: a vote of confidence in the certainty of spring, not to mention the flowers that populated the tables and corsages at my wedding. I placed one in the cart and TK looked down at it, head slightly tilted, and I told him what they meant. It was a good day.

Yesterday, though? Yesterday was one of those days when I feel I deserve credit just for getting through it sober. TK ended a playdate by screaming in the car on the way home before blessedly passing out. Our schedule shot, I put him directly to bed for an early nap and sacked out on the couch myself, exhausted from a night half-spent in his room after he had woken up and puked for no apparent reason. A couple of hours later, we were headed to Children’s Hospital for his second appointment there in two days. We had a follow-up with the doctor who injected him with botox two and a half weeks ago. That doctor walked in and took a look at TK, saying, “Oh.” Tilt unresolved. Shoulder hiked up. He felt the muscle in that shoulder and recommended an injection of local anesthetic to calm down the spasms. Within minutes, I was helping three people hold my son face-down on a table as he endured the needle placement. When they left, he fell asleep on my shoulder. Then the puking began. I mean, he destroyed that room, chunks of Goldfish everywhere.

When the carnage reached an intermission, I carried my sleeping boy across the unlit parking deck and to the car. That walk, the reverse of which a couple of hours earlier had been punctuated by TK’s excited “Ooh!”s and our shared laughter, felt nothing short of solitary now. His unconscious silence and my cramping arms fed the lie that beckoned at the edges of my tired mind: You are all alone.

It took us a lifetime to get home, traffic lengthening a typically ten-minute trip into nearly an hour, this journey punctuated by TK’s recurrent bouts of hurling and my fists pounding the steering wheel. I’m so tired of how hard this all is. There are moments when the only prayer is Why?

I didn’t get a because. Still don’t have one. But I did get an extra pair of arms in The Husband’s waiting help. I got the fact that after the ride from hell, as my child got sick repeatedly and helplessly in the back seat and I couldn’t immediately fix it, we arrived safely home. I got TH relieving me and staying with TK. I got surprise cupcakes delivered to our door. Thanks among the why.

And this morning, I got a mountain of vomit-stained towels and a dying flower.

But TK woke up and ate and kept it down. The towels went through the wash. And in a vote of confidence in the power of healing, I doused that flower with water and sat beside TK on the couch. A few hours later, the towels emerged fresh and unstained, and I stood at the sink getting ready to make lunch for my recovering son. I glanced up and saw the blooms, life refusing to give up and instead, reaching to the tips and bursting with color. The broken and the hopeful, always intermingled. Fitting.