By Katie Blackburn

I’m sitting in the waiting room of our orthodontist’s office with my three youngest children, making up a rather loud and untidy spectacle in what is an otherwise rather clean and quiet office. Mercifully, there is a small dedicated space for such circumstances, complete with Lego Duplo blocks, toy tractors, a few animal figurines, and a stack of coloring books and crayons—all of which my children have spread out all over the floor of this small corner in under twenty seconds. I’m unshowered and still in my workout clothes from my bike ride earlier today, but I’m well past wondering how this scene appears to onlookers. This public presentation of myself is my best at the moment, friends. Carry on.

We are waiting for my oldest daughter’s first consultation with the orthodontist, and between x-rays and measurements and simply waiting behind other patients, we—me and three children under four—are going to be in this corner of the waiting room for a while.

I am currently in a stage of life and parenting that I find rather confounding and short on solutions, and the most concerning characteristic of this phase is that if I sit down, if I let my neck tension melt and my core muscles fall into any sort of state of relaxation, I will, quite simply, fall asleep. And quickly. My eyes will refuse to stay open. If I am actually given three to five minutes to close my eyes, my body begins to shut down as well, and in such a profound, heavy manner that it makes being jolted awake—say, from the child I momentarily forgot I was responsible for—remarkably jarring for my whole nervous system.

I’d like to think this is a diagnosable form of narcolepsy, but in my case, I think it’s actually just motherhood.

My choices here in the orthodontist’s office are to stand and keep awkwardly pacing the hallway and make the receptionist nervous, or sit down and fall asleep and leave the toddlers unsupervised. I am not comfortable with either of these options, so I find a third: I grab a handful of crayons and a coloring book, and flip through the pages of donuts and unicorns in every artistic combination of the two that one could think of until I find one I want to work on, to keep my hands busy while we wait.

I’ve always enjoyed coloring, and a few minutes into my picture I remember why. It’s the perfect combination of mindless and mindful. I’m focused on staying in the lines and making the work look nice, but it’s also the kind of artistic expression that doesn’t demand too much creativity from my right brain—which is good, given how tired both sides of my brain currently are.

The main feature of the picture I’ve chosen is a donut with sprinkles, which I decide is chocolate frosted with pink and white decor. It’s rather cathartic, sitting here making something, watching over my other three children while I let them explore and play and imagine within the boundaries they’ve been given. Such an unglamorous moment in every way—a moderately smelly mother with her three loud kids—and yet I settle into this creative work so well, so easily, that my mind actually starts coming to life rather than falling asleep.

Within a few minutes, I begin thinking of essay ideas and book chapters and new courses to dream about putting together for work, right there in the middle of the mess. Art is miraculously generative, isn’t it? My coloring takes shape beautifully, and I feel a sense of momentum I could not have predicted coming from this moment. The donut is flawless—if I do say so myself—and my brain has found that elusive flow state that I have a hard time getting into with two hours alone at a coffee shop, much less in the orthodontist’s waiting room with three children crashing cars into toy dinosaurs on the floor. It’s miraculous. Just as I am about to pull out my phone to write down a sentence that came to me in the middle of the coloring, I hear a woman say, “Harper’s mom?”

Back to reality. “Yes, that’s me, over here,” I tell her.

“We’re all done with measurements, we can go back to the office to talk to the doctor about the plan now.”

I momentarily freeze and look at the dental assistant, the slightest bit dazed, because I have a coloring book on my lap, and both a crayon and a phone in my hand—one to finish coloring with and one for typing out a very elusive idea—and just as I am about to get very meta about art and motherhood and creating in the margins and finding beauty in the chaos, is she telling me I have to just stop, right here, and clean up after my children so we can all move on?

Of course none of these thoughts come out of my mouth. Instead, I say something profound like, “oh,” and stare at her for another second, waiting for my disappointment to wear off and my brain to go back to regular programming.

“Ok,” I finally follow up, “let us clean up and we will meet you back there,” I tell her.

“It’s the second door on the left,” she says, and turns and heads back toward it.

I set my phone down on the chair and tell myself my favorite lie—that I will remember the sentence later—then take the coloring book off my lap. I am tempted to rip out the page I’ve been working on, because it has served me well in the last twenty minutes by both keeping me awake and providing the context for my sudden burst of inspiration. Plus, I just want to finish it.

So much in my life goes unfinished right now, and for reasons I cannot fully articulate, the feeling of completing this work of art would be so satisfying, so life-giving. I know I know, it’s a donut and a unicorn. But it’s my donut and my unicorn, and we have an understanding, me and this coloring page.

But will I really take it out of my purse once I get home? Will life give me the chance to color again, uninterrupted, until I finish? Probably not. I let the thought pass as quickly as it came, close the coloring book, and try to get comfortable with the feeling of being unfinished.

The meeting with the orthodontist goes about as well I expected it would, in that we leave with a hefty payment plan and nine to twelve months of orthodontic intervention ahead. And as we drive home, I’m still thinking about the coloring page, and I wonder if this is what it will feel like when these same kids—the one preparing for braces, and three who were just laughing hysterically at their own imaginative antics in a waiting room—are ready to move on, too.

When that day comes, when the season of parenthood changes, will I look at my kids wordlessly and confounded and think, but wait, I’m not done! Will I summarize my time as a mother to young children by thinking, well, I did the best I could with what I had and tried not to fall asleep at inappropriate times, but in the end, I wanted to do more, I wanted to keep coloring. I wasn’t finished.

But I still drive towards home with a smile on my face, thinking about that half-finished donut and unicorn that I left in the book. Clearly colored in by a mother and not a toddler, I picture another tired young mom finding it. Maybe she will want to finish it, or perhaps she will start her own. But either way, I think we all start work that we never feel finished with, and I feel so thankful that the ultimate measurement isn’t what we finished but who we became—really, Who we became more like—in the process.

(Gosh, did I really get all this from a donut and a unicorn?)

Katie Blackburn lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband Alex and their six little ones, one of whom came to them through foster care. She is saved by grace and runs on cold brew coffee and quiet mornings at her desk. You can read more of her writing on faith, motherhood, special needs, and a good, good God at katiemblackburn.com or via her own Substack, Let Me Tell You. You can read Katie’s Coffee + Crumbs essays here, and purchase her book, Gluing the Cracks, here.

Photo by Jennifer Floyd.

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