My Family and Other Globalizers | The Tao of the Jigsaw

In life, as in a puzzle, you sometimes feel that a piece is missing. It rarely is. (Representational image: Ross Sneddon via Unsplash)

Note to readers: My Family and Other Globalizers is a weekly parenting column on bringing up global citizens.

The COVID pandemic was a globally unique moment in how it altered our ways of working, but also parenting. School is to most parents, the equivalent of a fairy godmother who transforms the Cinderella-work of childcare into the princess-like luxury of time for oneself to work, or vacuum, or, gasp, even read a novel.

For many parents around the world, the pandemic took away that fairy godmother and replaced her with the wicked stepmother of home-schooling. If someone had told me in the days before coronavirus became a standard part of our daily lexicon, that I would have to deal with my children 24x7, while simultaneously working from the same home that was also now occupied by my spouse and his constant Zoom-hum of conference calls, I would have contemplated volunteering for a scientific experiment that involved a long, medically induced coma. For the sake of scientific progress, you know.

But the pandemic ambushed us all and so, like millions of others, I found myself getting summer-vacation intimate with my family, in what was not a vacation at all, but a terrible global health crisis, where our human frailties suddenly went from being abstract to frighteningly concrete. Also, it became impossible to buy toilet paper – at least in Japan, where we were living at the time.

In the event, in common with many of those who were privileged enough not to be economically devastated by COVID, the home-schooling was a lot less painful than one had imagined. The first couple of months passed with me learning how to cook from my older son, who had begun watching MasterChef with a vengeance. By month-two of the pandemic, Ishaan had transformed into a home cook of considerable skill, although his efforts tended to leave the kitchen looking like a recently bombed, war zone. I am still not sure how he managed to get tomatoes on the ceiling, but that will remain one of motherhood’s enduring mysteries.

I, who had been crafts-challenged since kindergarten, took to painting peacocks with my younger child, Nico, and corralled both into enacting scenes from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. We played the three witches and used our cats as familiars.

My older son and I wrote coronavirus lyrics and set them to the music of pop classics. Here’s one paragraph we came up with (to be sung to the tune of The Sound of Silence):

But the greatest discovery during those months, was the Tao of the Jigsaw. My boys and I embarked on a series of 1,000-piece puzzles to pass the excess time. And as we fitted and refitted, watching pictures magic themselves out of messy heaps of pieces, I found myself channeling the spirit of Kungfu Panda’s Master Oogway in divining some Dreamworks-ready Eastern philosophy. Here’s what I learned:

1) When there is chaos - patience and perseverance will eventually coax out meaning.

2) You can miss the woods for the trees, but also the opposite. Take turns focusing on the big picture and the minutiae.

3) There are always red herrings along the journey. Things that appear to fit, do not always work.

4)  Conversely that which looks wrong can turn out to be right. It's better to give most things a try, rather than to rule them out immediately.

5) You will make mistakes. Be calm and redo.

6) In life, as in a puzzle, you sometimes feel that a piece is missing. It rarely is. Stop obsessing and tackle something else, and at some point, the "missing" piece turns up.

Our family’s home-schooling era was a lot shorter than for many who were less lucky. In Japan, the boys were back in school after only two months at home. We then moved to Spain in the summer of 2020, and schools in Madrid opened for the start of the academic year in September, and never closed. I had my fairy godmother back, although I’d discovered that the stepmother wasn’t as bad as I’d once feared.

The pandemic taught us that life is indeed a jigsaw puzzle. The last two years were one of those frustrating periods when none of the pieces seemed to fit. But we needed perseverance and hopefully, they will begin to slot into place now.