The Impossible Puzzle

My breath catches as I pull two homemade ornaments from the Christmas tree. In the first my son smiles back at me. The back reads, “Little Lambs 2023”. The second features my daughter, hair wild as she looks wide eyed up at the camera. The same handwriting marks the back, with the year 2025.

As I take the tree down, just a day after Christmas, I am equal parts relieved and sad. It feels impossible that another Christmas has come and gone, especially since the last 2 weeks have been a blur of sleep deprivation, fevers and snot. There were way more hard moments than magical ones in the lead up to the holiday, but it’s the joy that will stick with me. As much as I long desperately for more independence and more sleep, I am also distraught at how quickly time is slipping through my fingers.

I want nothing more than to bottle up a few of these days and save them away to visit 20 years from now. I know that future versions of me will be willing to trade anything to have a little girl lift her arms above her head and call out “hold me!” I will desperately long to play legos on the floor as a five-year-old tells me enthusiastically about various Pokemon and Minecraft characters I can’t keep straight. I know all of this is true and yet I am also at the end of my rope. I am tired, my nervous system is fried and I am touched out. I feel myself becoming quicker to snap, and I am constantly questioning if their various behaviors are the result of some failing on my part.

This tension is so intense, it feels like it will swallow me whole. One minute I feel like I am going to explode with frustration as I buckle a kicking three-year-old in her car seat, and the next my heart is melting as I hear her sing along to a Zootopia song in the as we drive. All I want is to be present, give them what they need and soak up every little moment of their fleeting childhood. And yet, there are dishes to be done, and dinners to be made and piles and piles of laundry to be washed and folded. I feel a pang of guilt anytime one of them asks me to play and I say no. I have no idea how to find the right balance, between creating a functioning, stable home for them to live in, and being present and enjoying them as they are.

I have this idea that if I can just do everything exactly right, I can do it all. That sneaky lie steals more joy than anything else. I fixate on snippets of other people’s lives and take them as evidence of my own shortcomings. I keep rearranging the puzzle pieces, desperate to make them fit together, only to realize they never will.

Because my life isn’t my own anymore. Pieces of me have now been mixed together with pieces of three other humans, and a few have been lost along the way. My life is fuller than it ever has been, and that is both incredible and incredibly hard. It’s not only that two things can be true. Two things must be true. You don’t get the good without the hard. You can’t have a house full of laugh

ter and joy without messes being made. And you can’t clean up those messes without tampering that fun sometimes. The truth is, no matter what I’m doing, a piece of me will long to be doing something else. I used to think that was a problem to be fixed, but now I realize it’s evidence of a full life.