I remember reading about the concept of hygge a few years ago when it was all the rage in America: a form of sprucing up our winters so they’d be more fun (bearable); a way to transform them into something evergreen-scented and Instagrammable. We do this with everything, you know. We turn suffering into a cursively-printed meme so that it looks like we chose to put ourselves within our current circumstances, like this is all part of our greater plan to better ourselves and the world.

There is no dressing up the flu.

Last week, on the third day of my three days of antibiotics, I was driving home from getting fingerprinted for permanent Australian residency paperwork when my phone rang. My doctor was on the other end of the line: “You’re going to laugh,” he said. “Want to f-ing bet?” I wished I could say, because I knew what was coming: my throat swab had come back positive for influenza A.

So there had been no real need, other than placebo effect, for that gut-searing trio of pills, but I wasn’t mad. I felt validated. I texted The Husband from the next red light–I HAVE THE FLU, OFFICIALLY–so that he’d know the struggle had, indeed, been real, that my hacking coughs at bedtime weren’t just for show. My aches and exhaustion had a source, one I’d supposedly been inoculated against but JUST KIDDING NOT THAT STRAIN, and the preceding and next few days would be marked by mandated rest.

Cue the Netflix.

“I always wish I had more time to read and watch TV, and then when I do, I’m mad that I can’t do more,” I told a friend, who reasoned that it would be more fun to read and watch TV if I didn’t feel like shit. I forgot that part. Nonetheless, I camped out in front of of the brick-of-a-memoir I’m reading, in front of peppermint and camomile teas, in front of Adam Sandler movies, in front of a week devoid of the gym and sweating other than from a fever. Then, on Saturday as I was getting my hair did for a dinner, my hairstylist mused that maybe the alcohol that would be served that night would actually help me get better, and my recovery officially entered a new mode: back to real life.

But not too far back into it, as I sat on the couch Sunday and searched Netflix for Christmas movies, settling finally on 2015’s A Very Murray Christmas and spending the next hour charmed by its host. Winter in Sydney is not the brutal whitescape that motivated the Danes toward the philosophy of hygge, but also: it’s not the beautiful whitescape that motivated the Danes toward the philosophy of hygge. It’s a number of things, among them the good–sixty-five degree days at the beach in the sun; the bad–grey dreariness for days at a time; and the ugly–no Christmas.

So I made my own little hygge right there on the couch, Christmas carols and peppermint tea blazing. I had been forced into a week of rest and this was its swan song, the celebration of stillness.

This stillness is not one I chose, like so many of the hard-to-unwrap gifts I’ve been given. But the unwrapping has occurred anyway, the presents revealed in the present: closeness with the boys on the couch; laughing together at The Cat in the Hat‘s animated antics; watching them get bored, tell me about their boredom, and then create tools to deal with it; hearing them play together; forcing them into an awareness of a mom who can’t do as much or be as everything right now. TH took them to school one morning while I both luxuriated in this rare event and questioned my own value without my typical usefulness.

I had a lot of time to think, is what I’m saying. A lot of time to…notice.

And here is what I noticed, the things that pop out in stillness and reveal themselves as gifts: how easy it usually is to use my lungs. How beautiful the view is from the window. How good food can taste. How social Little Brother is, how he puts too much pressure on himself to please others, how gorgeously affectionate and sensitive he is. How The Kid may complain about what he has to do, but then he does it and I get a photo texted from his therapist of the artwork he spent hours on at school, a rendering–his incomparable rendering–of a book cover that is now on its way to be celebrated in the principal’s office with the teacher’s comment echoing my own: “I just love the way he sees the world.”

These moments of awareness, of the clouds opening up for the rainbow, of rest in the midst of everything else: like a song, maybe the one I chose or the one the boys did, echoing throughout the car as LB sings along in the backseat, music always waiting to be heard.