piecing the puzzle

Sometimes even the most ordinary, unassuming days can quickly go sour. On Tuesday, for instance, I woke up early and washed, folded, ironed, and put away my weekly loads of laundry, just as I do every Tuesday morning. I got the boys ready for the day, and put Garrett on the school bus. After I saw him off, Caleb and I boarded a train bound for Atlantic Terminal to run a few errands. Everything so far that day had been perfectly normal.

But the winds changed direction on the elevator ride back up to street level when the woman I was riding with didn't hear me say thank you after she held the door open and made a hurtful point of telling me how impolite she thought I was. A few minutes later, just as I'd begun my shopping, I received a phone call from the school nurse, who told me that Garrett had developed a high fever and that I needed to come pick him up. I abandoned my errands, turned myself around, checked Garrett out of school, and, because his eyes had grown gunky and irritated, took him to the doctor. The diagnosis, pinkeye; the eye drops, too torturous, and consequently impossible, to successfully administer. The rest of the day was obsessively, and exhaustively, spent washing hands, disinfecting, and doing everything I could to prevent the spread of conjunctivitis to the rest of the family, especially Caleb.

By the time Blake came home in the late evening, I was spent. I'd managed to get the boys to bed, and then all but crashed on the couch. No doubt following some inspired prompting, Blake took a good, long look at me and asked if I needed a priesthood blessing. My initial reaction was to decline, but in the end I accepted the offer. It turned out that I needed that blessing more than I thought I did. It was beautiful, and exactly what I needed to hear.

As I sat afterward in the rocking chair pondering the things he'd said, Blake asked me what I was thinking. Instead of answering plainly, I started to cry. The part of the blessing that struck me the most, and what I was thinking about when Blake asked, was the firm reminder that my Heavenly Father loves me and was so very pleased with how I am doing as a mother. Some days -- most days, really -- it is hard to remember this. I'm too impatient, and too often selfish in my motives. I get frustrated with and yell at my boys more often than I care to admit. Despite the fact that others often see me as having everything in my life well in control, I usually feel like I'm flying by the seat of my pants, hanging on one crazy day at a time. "I just feel like I'm falling apart," I told Blake through my tears. "Sometimes it's too hard to believe that Heavenly Father thinks I'm doing a good job."

He nodded, more in sympathy than in agreement. "What if it's not so much falling apart as it is trying to build up?" he asked.

I thought about that, and as I did the image of a jigsaw puzzle, the kind with a thousand tiny pieces, came to mind. Maybe he was right. Maybe I am just trying to piece myself together. I'm generally not very good at putting together puzzles like this. They make me dizzy, and I'm too impatient. The puzzle of myself was, I imagined, filled with missing pieces and empty spaces. But as slow and difficult as the process is to put it together, I am somehow managing to do just that, with, of course, lots of help from others along the way. I'm not taking it apart; I'm slowly, very slowly, trying to piece it together. Someday, a long time from now, the puzzle will be finished, and I maybe won't feel like such a mess all the time. But in the meantime it'd be wise for me to remember that my Heavenly Father is pleased with my efforts to keep at it.