Chapter 8: Piecing The Puzzle Together and Decorating our Lives: Work-Life Balance and the Sacredness of Everyday Experiences

I have always enjoyed the visual aesthetics of home décor. Whether it is painted walls filled with family photos or rich architectural design, the decorations in a home tell the stories of our lives. Growing up, the third child of four in a single-parent home, there was a limited amount of resources that would allow us to decorate. However, my mother was a puzzle enthusiast who spent her limited amount of free time piecing together jigsaw puzzles with nature scenes and other beautiful images. To appease my desire for home décor, my mother allowed me to use her completed puzzles to decorate the walls of our home. We glued together the backs of her completed puzzles to create homemade wall art. I noticed the most serene look in my mother’s eyes when the puzzle glue dried and we would flip the puzzle over to look at it. She would rub her hand smoothly across the surface and smile before we found the best location to hang it somewhere around the house. Sometimes, after hanging the puzzle one of the pieces would end up coming off and somehow misplaced. She would then fuss about how the beauty of the puzzle was lost from that one missing piece.