number fifty four: do a mega puzzle

Originally posted 23 December 2017.

Earlier in the year I started babysitting for a family I know from church. Two active boys under four. The older loved doing puzzles. There was a whole drawer full of them. Huge ones. Superhero ones. Educational ones. We'd sit and finish one just to rip it apart and do it all over again. It wasn't long before I became pretty addicted to the challenge of the puzzle. So I decided to make a trip to Kmart and get started on my number fifty four... do a mega puzzle.

Doing a puzzle just means doing a puzzle, right? Well, not when you're me. The English teacher in me has to pull some kind of metaphor or parallel. I know we're only a few days from Christmas, but I've actually been thinking a whole lot more about the new coming year and reflecting on what's happened during the year... and completing this puzzle has brought to light a few lessons that I really need to learn.

1. Breathe. Take things one bit at a time. Set realistic expectations.

When I picked up the box at Kmart it seemed pretty small and 1000 pieces seemed pretty do-able (this coming from someone who had never done a puzzle bigger than 30 pieces). Easy. I got started with the old trick I remembered of finding all the corner and side pieces. Easy. Except that meant I had to sift through every single piece. All 1000 of them. And somehow, even after sifting through each piece, I'd left out several edge pieces. I'd also picked the puzzle of cupcakes. Easy. Beautiful and different colours. No. Brown. Fifty shades of brown. Why?

It wasn't long before the pieces were put back in the box for a few months. Oh, not because it looked hard. Pfffft. But it was bigger than expected and took up half the table. True story (totally not the whole story). A new house and a larger table, I put my big girl pants on, and over a few days I finally got the edge completed. And it stayed that way for another few months.

I would look over at the puzzle border and just feel overwhelmed. How was I ever going to get it done? Somehow in my head I'd decided that it had to be knocked over in a day or not at all. This coming from an absolute puzzle novice. But how often to do we do that to ourselves? This thing needs to be done perfect and straight away or it's not worth it. Why bother? Or, that thing is something I'd really like to do but it seems way too overwhelming so I just won't even try. Rome wasn't built in a day. Things worth doing or trying may take some time, and we need to be patient.

2. Sometimes what we think is right, just isn't. Things can take a while to fall into place. Don't force it.

Once the pieces started coming well together I started getting pretty excited. When I finished my first cupcake I dragged Josh over to show him like a proud kid who just wrote their name for the first time. I would hold a piece in my hand, and playing it safe with the picture on the box an inch from my face, I'd find where it was supposed to go. A lot of the time that spot wouldn't be developed enough for it to fit just yet so I'd set it aside.

When I got pretty far along I'd take the piece and shove it in the spot it belonged. But it wouldn't fit. I'd look at the piece and then back at the box. Yeah, it definitely went there. So why wouldn't it fit? It wasn't until I got to the very final pieces that I figured I was wrong. It actually went somewhere totally different. And I'd wasted so much energy being frustrated that it wouldn't fit where I *knew* it was supposed to go.

There are so many unanswered questions. Trust me. I have plenty. Sometimes it sucks. Most of the time it sucks. A lot of the time, I don't have the bigger picture of my life an inch from my face. I just have this one tiny piece that I'm screaming at to fit somewhere it doesn't belong. It takes a lot of strength and trust in something bigger than yourself to set it aside and wait to see where and how it's supposed to fit in.

3. All the pieces are there. Just not always when we want them.

The puzzle bug hit me when I only had about 4 or so cupcakes to go. I'd organised all my remaining pieces into cupcake categories. Chocolate flakes. Caramel with sprinkles. Strawberry with the chocolate swirl. But of all my completed cupcakes, there was one that was still missing a single piece. Every now and then I'd send out a search party for just that specific piece, but I kept turning up empty. This was a brand new puzzle, but was it somehow missing a piece? I'd moved the table to accommodate the Christmas tree. Had I lost it somehow?

That small empty space showing the white of the table was incredibly irritating. So I kept working on the other cupcakes. Until I had only 20 or so pieces left. I tried everyone of them and they didn't fit that one empty spot. So I kept working on the rest of the pieces elsewhere. One by one they found their home. It was the third last piece. It finally fit in that empty spot. The piece had been there all along, but for some reason it didn't fit right until now.

Last night I spent a good 45 minutes uncontrollably crying. And a few days before that I got a solid 20 minutes in. And a few weeks before that I spent a whole day in bed, on and off crying. And amongst all those times, I'm either crying, or trying not to cry, or trying not to see baby things on social media or trying to pretend like I'm good when people ask how I am because it's not really the time or place to spill my guts to the fact that I'm an emotional mess.

It is an epic challenge to not look at other people's full puzzles and look back at all the holes in your own. It is an epic challenge to not envy the ease and speed at which other people put their pieces together. It is an epic challenge to do everything in your power to get the pieces in your puzzle and turn up empty month, after month, after month.

I'm trying to believe that my piece is there and one day I'll have it. Some days it's easy. Starting this list made it easy. But after a year of treatment and no success, it's been harder. I guess what's right for me in this new year is to just keep working on other parts in my life's puzzle. And hopefully I'll go back to being okay with that.