Puzzling, to me, has always been an activity for people who lack legitimate hobbies. The thought of assembling 500 jigsawed pieces of cardboard to recreate the “Mona Lisa” has never been my idea of time well spent. And word games? I’d rather scrub the F train clean with a dirty sock than try to decipher the riddle “What’s a five-letter synonym for ‘amalgamation’?” Remember the O.G. Windows puzzle game Minesweeper? I clicked aimlessly at those gray squares until the board exploded.
But then I had children, and navigating your way through a problem is a primary activity of parenting. In some ways I had to become the ultimate puzzle master. Bring me a hungry tummy or skinned knee, and I can conjure a solution. If my 5-year-old son was bored, I could remind him of his ongoing Lego project, or hand him an empty Amazon box to decorate. If he was scared, I could hug him and tell him the Jim Carey version of the Grinch is fake and lives only inside the TV. I’d grown accustomed to these straightforward needs. Then, one day, he added a literal puzzle to my never-ending to-do list: a Rubik’s Cube.
“Mommy, solve this,” he demanded, assuming I could do so. I took the cube from his hand and noticed that his fist was significantly less doughy than it was a year earlier. “Of course I can fix it,” I said. For a few minutes, I twisted the layers around and around, listening to the plastic clicking and clacking. Naturally, none of the colors lined up. “Let’s see if someone can help,” I said, opening my laptop. My son snuggled up close to me on the couch with his ever-lengthening limbs. I searched for remaining spots of baby fat on him as I researched Rubik’s Cube tutorials on YouTube. A pimply teenager walked us through “The Easiest 10-Minute Rubik’s Cube Lesson,” demonstrating specific processes to tackle each side. Over and over, I fumbled the righty and lefty algorithms. I replayed the video at least 50 times, but by bedtime I hadn’t made any headway.
With the cube still unsolved, I tucked my son into bed. No flash of disappointment registered on his face as I apologized for my lack of proficiency in enigmatology. In my own bed I continued manipulating the cube. The process, to my surprise, had an addictive quality. Rotating the sections and occasionally aligning the right colors felt like mastering the right steps in a dance — although, in my case, it was more of a drunken stagger than a waltz.
But I was determined to keep trying, to waltz. After all, I had always been my son’s capable fixer. As he has aged, his needs have become more complex. We’ve transitioned from how to make a boo-boo better to pondering questions like “Where was I before I was born?” and “What if I’m lonely after you and mom die?” He needed me to shift away from the physical stage of parenting to an existential one for which I lacked sufficient answers. Maybe the cube would let me hold onto the concrete for a little while longer.
When he woke up the next morning, he asked if I had solved it. And so, before finishing my first cup of coffee, I picked the cube back up and once again tried to untangle it. I shifted the cube in various directions between running baths and folding laundry. “Are you even watching this?” my wife asked as we sat in bed watching 50-year-old women yell at one another in designer gowns on our favorite show, and I had hardly looked up from the cube. As parents of young children, one of the few moments we have together, just the two of us, is the too-brief hour after they’re in bed and before one of us passes out. The cube was interfering with that sacred time — but I had to get it right.
We were into our second week without a solved cube when, instead of answering a work email, my hands expertly maneuvered and something in my brain snapped into place. I realized I was finally going to crack it — I was just twists away. I shifted the squares two more times and then, finally: I solved it. Stunned and self-congratulating, I picked up my son an hour early from his after-school program with the completed cube in hand.
He beamed and cheered. Then, immediately, he scrambled all my hard work. Within seconds, I watched the perfect coordination dissolve into a primary-color hodgepodge. “Let’s do it again!” he shouted. It was a devastating reminder of a lesson I had already learned: I was a mere stagehand in a production centered on his life. Yes, being a parent means being a puzzle-solver in ways big and small. At times you have to do things that feel hard — hard because you’re tired or lack patience or simply don’t know how. But being a parent also means that none of it is about you. It’s about scooting over and focusing all that tired mental and physical and emotional energy on someone else. Occasionally it pays off and you do something that previously felt impossible, like getting everyone to bed without yelling — or solving a Rubik’s Cube.
Still, I love working on the cube — beginning with a mess and gradually shaping it into a microcosm of order. Unlike with child-rearing, there is no wondering if I made the right choice. As my son grows, so will his problems, evolving with an intricacy too nuanced for YouTubers to resolve. I won’t be able to fix all of them, but the Rubik’s Cube did unlock a new parenting hypothesis: Maybe all I can reasonably hope to do is show up, try, fail and change course.
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