Sometime in the early weeks of January — after the LA fires, right before the inauguration — I decided that I would deal with my frayed nervous system by puzzling. I had zero interest in puzzles as a child and did not get into them in 2020 (I went the sourdough route). Even though I often vacationed with a family (my own) that would sit hunched over an assortment of coffee tables for hours trying to put together 1,000 piecers, I’d watch them from across the room, book and wine glass in hand, with something akin to pity.
The gateway was a banned books puzzle: irresistible for so many reasons, but the first being that these were all books these horrible, newly appointed politicians wanted to disappear from our shelves and our minds. But I knew them well and wanted to spend more time with them: Are you There God? It’s Me, Margaret. Fun Home. Heavy. Front Desk. The Grapes of Wrath. Every evening, I took tremendous pleasure figuring out how to put the small pieces together, and I often squealed in delight when an entire section took shape. Look what I did! I’d yell at my daughter, who so kindly said, You’ve got this, Mom, and I had to laugh because it was so far from true, that I “had” the puzzle or any of the rest of it, the messes unfolding all around us, but there is nothing better than a 11-year-old girl’s support.
Once it was complete, I was sold. Why had it taken me so long? This was clearly the key to my sanity in 2025 and beyond. I borrowed a bunch from friends and family, but decided that if I was going to sit for weeks in front of something for no real reason, I wanted to be looking at a thing of beauty. So I walked over to the local gift shop and picked out the most beautiful one I could find.
My parents were visiting at the time and my dad is a very good puzzler (see above) so he spent many days building the frame while I tinkered here and there, at a much slower pace. This one was harder and provided fewer immediately moments of joy and satisfaction (“there’s The Hate U Give!”). There were so many, many white pieces.
I’m sure you know where this story is going.
My parents went home, and — of course — the puzzle sat there. In the meantime, we’d decided, uncharacteristically, that dinner was best eaten in front of Gilmore Girls, so we quite literally ate on top of the thing for, I’m ashamed to say, weeks. Months? A month. Surely it was a whole month. Every time I tried to put it together, it felt too hard, and every time I thought, Fuck this, free up the table, at least! I couldn’t get myself to give up on what I’d already assembled (or what my dad had). So there it sat, heavy with my own ambivalence.
Can I pause here and say that this is so very much like writing a novel, in my humble experience? It just sits there, in your view, for a very long time, and much of it has a shape — corners, a frame, or something vaguely resembling one — but the rest is in pieces that you do not know how to make fit and the only thing to do is to just sit there and try things. You have to make some choices, a wise and wonderful writer said to me recently after talking me through my many-ith revision of my first 100 pages. Try something, get to the end. If it doesn’t work, try something else. But not making a choice is worse than making the wrong one.
I was shocked that my husband said nothing. This is really where I fall down in marriage — one of many ways, the things I say. This would have driven me completely insane, if he’d left an unfinished puzzle on the coffee table for more than a few days. I probably would have eventually gotten so annoyed, I might have just put it away myself, loudly and with much dramatic flair, when he wasn’t home. You snooze you lose, buddy. But not him.
Perhaps he saw that I was working through something, that I’d come back to it eventually. Surely he thought it wasn’t worth the fight. Maybe he chose to not see it at all. (Maybe he literally didn’t see it? You never know with men?) In any event, I was grateful for the grace, for the wide berth. This is so very often the best thing we can give a spouse.
When one of my best friends showed up with her son from New York to sleep on our couch for four days — directly next to the mess of the puzzle — she told me point blank that we would finish it before she left. I was skeptical: she wasn’t here long, the schedule was packed, neither of us are expert puzzlers, I didn’t really seem to care enough to finish it (and I had no idea why she should care, this was not her responsibility!). But one night, we sat down on the floor and got to it. Or she did: I talked and sort of mindlessly tried things and then gave up and kept talking, but she mostly stopped talking to me and became obsessed with the puzzle. That first night, when I went to bed close to midnight, I said, Do not keep going! Go to bed! She promised she would but when I got up the next morning, an entirely new section was smiling back at me.
You know, too, where this story is going. We did finish it. She did 75% of the work, but she pushed me to show up for the last 25. There’s a metaphor in here, too, of course, one that’s so obvious it’s barely worth mentioning — sometimes we need a helping hand, another set of eyes, a friend, etc. — but there’s more to it than that. I’d forgotten about determination, about focus, about sticking with something. Or I hadn’t forgotten about the skills it took. I’d just forgotten why I cared about the thing to begin with.
And here we are, back at novel-writing, or at any kind of long-term project; it is even, at times, similar to how one feels in a long marriage: Why did I care about this in the first place? Why did I even begin this beautiful mess? Should I just put it back in the box, rather than stare at my own impatience, faults, failures? Wouldn’t my life be easier without it crowding out the table?
More often than not, you just need someone to sit down near you and say: don’t put it back in the box. You care about this. You care a whole lot. This can, indeed, be done. Let’s try.
Sending you love, and the strength to keep going—
xo Abs
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So, I bought my first puzzle in Dec. 2019 as a form of stress relief, and when my niece came to visit in Jan. 2020 (last house guest before the pandemic, maybe) she helped me make real progress on it. But then March 2020 came, and my partner had dementia, and the cats kept knocking over the pieces, and when we wanted to eat at the dining room table, I had to cover the puzzle. So, the layers on the dining room table were as follows: table cloth, puzzle cloth, puzzle, towel (to keep it from the cats) and, occasionally, a second table cloth.
As time went on, I basically gave up on the puzzle, and the second table cloth stayed on permanently. But after my partner died in early 2022, the friend who came right afterward wanted me to admit defeat on the puzzle and reclaim my dining room table. I said no.
I really, really, thought I would finish the puzzle. And then I never did. Those five layers stayed on the dining room table for more than FIVE YEARS. And then a few weeks ago, when I was taking the top table cloth up to wash it, I thought, fuck it, and I took the puzzle apart and put it back in the box. Now, my dining room table has only a single table cloth on it.
The lesson, I guess, is that things take the time they take. I wasn't ready until I was.
But, in other news, after the election, I refocused on the novel I'd been writing in fits and starts since 2021, and I am actually writing it. So maybe I traded the puzzle I wasn't doing for the novel?
I tell myself that I will try again with the puzzle another time, but who knows.
Thanks for this!
Beautiful, Abby! You captured that feeling I get when I hesitate to return to my works-in-progress.