I don’t know how, exactly, we became a family who owned too many puzzles. Seeing how I didn’t do a single puzzle between early childhood and early marriage — the reintroduction occurring when my then husband’s family brought them out at holidays — it’s a surprise that they took as strong as they did in our home. Puzzles aren’t incredibly compelling, if you ask me.
However, my first-born would beg to differ. That girl loves a puzzle, so I’m going to place some of the responsibility on her, even though I’m guessing she did not purchase a single one in our collection. Most of them are scenes of adorable fictional towns where every building has colored shutters on the windows and every sidewalk is lined with ladies wearing long skirts. We also have puzzles of vintage airplanes, one of silly hairstyles, one of classic cereal boxes, and one featuring Broadway musical posters. That one we purchased twice: the first time we assembled it, it spread so wide, it hung slightly off the coffee table, which evidently invited the dog to eat three posters’ worth of pieces. That he enjoyed this eye-level, cardboard snack was not well received by the aforementioned child.
If you’ve put together a puzzle before, you may have developed an assembly strategy. My first step is always to dig around and collect the side pieces as well as the four corners and string together the puzzle’s frame. Some people sort by color. In any case, our brains see a box of 500 or 1000 loose pieces and quickly try to make sense of the chaos. Inevitably, once we have the more obvious pieces in place, we are left with a pile of pieces that don’t make sense. We don’t have any idea where they go. This is where puzzling starts to lose me, to be honest. I lose patience somewhere in the sky. Why is the sky always such a pain?
Now consider that the puzzle pieces represent the hundreds of little experiences happening in your home through the eyes of your children. Consider there is a completely different box for every child. No two puzzles are the same, and they have no box lids to follow. Our children, at all times, are piecing together a picture of what their life looks like and are desperately trying to make it all make sense. They are always trying to understand the story, but they are children, and so it’s very difficult. If there is a level of chaos or crisis in your home, there might be a lot of pieces that don’t make sense. Our kids don’t know how to fit these confusing moments into the picture of their life.
Let’s jump back to actual puzzle building. Think about how you’ve stared at a confusing piece before and thought, “What is this? It could be part of this green tree, but it also could be the green grass, or the green in that person’s shirt.” You’ve probably thought, I have no idea where this piece belongs.
This is how our kids might feel when they have experiences that don’t seem to fit with the rest of what they’ve already assembled. They might not know what to do with the time they saw dad stay in bed for a week but didn’t have a cold. Or when mom cried all day. Or when everyone was supposed to go to grandma’s, but suddenly, no one was going to grandma’s, and no one wanted to talk about why. If there is disruption to their routine — a parent didn’t come home and wasn’t there to kiss them goodnight — they end up with loose pieces. They might catch certain words or hear yelling, but they don’t have enough data to understand. When problems last for years, when trauma becomes layered, the pile of confusing pieces grows. And just because a child doesn’t ask questions does not mean they don’t have loose pieces they are trying to comprehend.
Many of my SoulCare clients — on second thought, it’s been all of them — ask me how to talk to their kids about the really difficult things the family is experiencing. Understandably, we are all unsure of how to discuss things like divorce, not to mention how to place language around complex dynamics like abuse or depression. I give my clients the puzzle metaphor, and I tell them that they are the ones holding the box lid. As parents, we have the ability to offer our child age-appropriate truth so that the child can keep slowly making sense of all the loose pieces.
Let’s talk about a couple common temptations. One is to assume that if you don’t talk about the sad and hard things, then you can avoid handing your child any “negative” pieces. And if the child has none of the sad pieces, they will be able to assemble a happier and more peaceful picture of your family. Of course, this is what we’d like to be true. But our children are accumulating their own lived experiences daily. We are not the ones handing them the pieces. They have eyes and ears; as long as they are in the home, the loose pieces that don’t make sense are accumulating.
Our role is to sit beside them, bravely examine the pieces they are working with, and tell them where they belong. We have this privilege because we see the bigger picture. We hold the lid.
Another temptation is to minimize or reframe the negative experiences our children may have witnessed to presumably protect them from feeling the ache of what’s really going on. This approach might seem to work in the short term, and it certainly feels better for us as parents to believe we are protecting our kids from a harsher reality. I’m not saying kids should be made to digest the fullness of adult relationship dysfunction. Absolutely not. But ultimately, we don’t want to teach them to jam dark pieces into the light side of the puzzle. The dark pieces only fit where there is darkness. To teach your children to fit dark pieces into the light spaces will not serve them, it will not protect them, and at worst, it’s likely to blur their discernment between dark and light to begin with.
I know from experience how hard it is to forget that when we are navigating difficult subjects with our kids, the goal is to help them make sense of their worlds, not to insulate them from bad feelings. We can always offer comfort and tender care when the bad feelings arise. But if they’ve just been left confused or told their lived experiences weren’t scary or painful, we risk losing status as a trustworthy or reliable witness of the same events.
Think of how many times a day your child comes to you in need of help because their world doesn’t make sense. From school, to friendships, to their bodies, and boundaries, the best we can do is look inside their little hands, see the pieces they are trying so desperately to place into their puzzle, and tell them where the pieces belong.
Give the pieces names. Tell the truest story you can that does not minimize or reframe, but instead validates their lived experience.
I don’t know how a child can make peace with the darker areas in the puzzle unless we can make peace with those areas first, and maybe that’s step one for you. What I do know, probably from owning too many puzzles, is that there is a small but deep satisfaction every time I can get a piece to snap into the right spot. And it’s never so much about the completed image, is it? The best parts about putting together a puzzle are both knowing that something lovely is hiding in the mess and doing the methodical work of finding it.
We must believe beauty is hiding in the mess of our kids’ stories. Maybe this faith is the thing that keeps us in the brave place of offering truth and equipping our kids to snap each piece into place. If the image coming together is a snarling dragon, at least we know it’s a snarling dragon. The not knowing, the confusion of an incomplete picture or a picture where the wrong pieces have been jammed into the wrong spots is far scarier.
If you have any specific questions for me about parenting our kids through hard seasons, or about anything else, my January Q&A for paid subscribers drops next week. You can ask your questions either in the comments or by replying to the email and I will be answering them by the end of the month via audio that will be linked in a follow up email.
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Wishing you a great week.
You are the Beloved,
Leslie