This is the Step Where Most People Get Lost
By Laura Leinbach
@lauraleeme
“Mommy, it’s broken,” my son, Logan, eyes glossy and voice trembling, holds out the brand-new Rubik’s Cube I gave him just a few minutes ago. Colors thoroughly intermingled, he passes me the cube and slumps down onto the couch.
“What? No, it’s not broken; it’s just mixed up,” I say. “That’s the whole point. You mix it up and then the fun is solving it again.”
He sits up and leans in closer. “But I can’t. Can you?”
“I can totally do this,” I tell him. Just a few days ago, I saw a reel that promised solving a Rubik’s Cube isn’t as hard as it seems. In my placement interview last month to determine my new role moving forward in my company’s merger, I touted solving complex problems as one of my key strengths. With Google and a little grit, I have no doubt I’ll figure it out.
***
“Don’t forget to submit your time off requests for 2021 by the end of the week!”
I blinked at the email from HR. It was December of 2020, and after navigating the worst of COVID, signing divorce papers, selling a house, buying a new one on my own, and finalizing a custody agreement, I definitely needed a vacation. The kids did, too. I may have been through hell the past year, but they’d had their whole world turned upside down.
They deserved a week of fun and adventure.
But vacationing with a one-year-old, three-year-old, and five-year-old sounded more daunting than relaxing the more I thought about it. The stuff, the expense, the already borderline impossible single-mom life (only without the comforts and familiarity of home) … it would be way too much to do on my own.
I tapped out a hopeful text to my mom.
“Would you and Dad want to go on vacation with us this summer, by any chance? Planning to rent an Airbnb somewhere within easy driving distance, maybe the beach. No pressure, just wanted to throw it out there.”
Breath held, I waited for a response. Was this too big of an ask? Would they say yes only out of obligation? Or worse, say no?
***
Google spits out the Rubik’s Cube guidance I need, and in a couple minutes, I manage to form the white cross, step one of the solution. No sweat.
“Until this point, the procedure was pretty straightforward, but from now on, we have to use algorithms,” the article says. A couple of minutes stretch to fifteen, and I mutter in frustration needing to start over at the beginning multiple times.
Hearing my grumbling, Logan looks up from the floor where he plays with his sisters. “You’re never gonna fix it!” he exclaims, arms crossed.
“Listen, I keep messing up. This is harder than I thought, but I’m making it further every time,” I reassure him. “We’ve gotta get upstairs and do bedtime, but I’ll finish it after I put you to bed. Don’t worry.”
Kids tucked in, I trudge back downstairs to pick up where I left off. I am making progress, but the directions are confusing, and I’d rather be in bed than back on the couch with the cube. But I promised Logan I’d solve it.
***
My phone buzzed—a text from my mom. “I just put the vacation dates on my calendar, but isn’t Gracie still in school at the end of May?”
Crap.
I’d balanced my work schedule, coworker conflicts, my parents’ availability, and the custody schedule only to forget that my oldest was in kindergarten now, and we couldn’t just up and go on vacation during the school year.
How could I have forgotten something so important? And what on earth was I going to do about it?
Maybe Gracie could just log in from the beach for the couple days our trip overlapped with school. Thanks to COVID, she only had school in-person half the week anyway. Or maybe we could call it an educational trip … sure enough, the parent/student handbook outlined the process to request an excused absence for vacation. I had it filled out and emailed to the principal before the end of my workday, and to my great relief, it was approved.
A few months later, I Tetris'd a comical amount of stuff—luggage, pack ‘n play, stroller, kids’ bikes—into my three-row SUV and loaded Gracie, Logan, and Darbie in for the drive. Before we pulled out of the driveway, I lifted my phone for a video in selfie mode. “One, two, three …” I counted down.
“On our way to Cape May!” we cheered in unison. I texted the video to my parents who’d driven up ahead of us and would be waiting at the Airbnb with helping hands and a hot dinner.
***
I was still optimistic an hour ago when I tucked Logan into bed, but that’s shifted to something more like grim determination.
The guide pulled up on my phone is less “follow the directions” and more “work through these stages”—each with its own puzzle to be solved before you move on to the next. Progress is made via algorithms prescribing a specific series of twists and turns, but the unfamiliar cube notation confuses me. I’ll spin the wrong piece, or the right piece but in the wrong direction, and find I’ve accidentally undone everything I’d accomplished.
I just got to stage four of seven, made another wrong move, and am scrolling back up to the top of the guide on my phone to start back at square one. Again.
***
After a successful experiment in Cape May, vacations with Grammalee and Grandpa became our new normal and a highlight of every summer—a week of museums and monuments in Washington, D.C. in 2022 and a retreat into nature at a cabin in the Pocono mountains in 2023.
“So listen, Mom,” I said with my best sales pitch voice earlier this year. “We were watching old episodes of Fixer Upper, and the kids asked if we could go see it in real life—the Silos, the Bakery, the Castle, all of it. And I just laughed at first, but I think we can actually do it.”
Now that we’re out of the toddler years, flying doesn’t seem so scary. And between career (and salary) growth and a slow recovery from the financial hits of divorce and custody legal proceedings, there’s room in my budget to do something a little bigger this summer.
“Summer Vacation 2024: Texas.” I spread my hands out in the air over the table between us, forming an imaginary banner.
“Texas? Wow,” she said hesitantly. “I have to talk to your father, but I’m not sure. We’ve got a pretty packed schedule, and I’m not sure about our budget this year either.”
I’d expected enthusiasm, and her uncertain response deflated me.
“What’s your plan? Do you have dates and costs?” she asked.
“Well, no, not yet. With the company merger in April, everything’s still kind of up in the air for me with PTO and benefits until my new role is official. I did get confirmation that I’ll stay 100% remote moving forward.”
We agreed to circle back on Texas talks when we both knew more—me from my new employer, her from my dad.
I was already head over heels for the idea of Waco, but the idea of doing it on my own was petrifying. Airports scare me with their high stakes and hectic atmosphere. I was nervous even when I flew alone for the first time last fall. Adding three children—who’ve never flown before—plus their luggage is … a lot. My brain has no trouble adding more worst-case scenarios to my concerns: canceled flights, a plane crash, a kid wandering off, security snafus.
And that’s just to get there. Waco is 1,500 miles from home and backup if anything goes wrong.
***
It’s been over two hours now, and I am about to restart the Rubik’s Cube process for my I-don’t-even-know-what-number attempt. It’s almost 10 p.m., and I very much want to abandon this infuriating, complicated puzzle and go to bed.
But I’m close. And I promised.
I sigh and start over. After repeating them over and over again, the earlier steps actually are beginning to make more sense. The starting cross on the white face can’t be just any arrangement of squares. Red, blue, orange, and green each have a fixed side they belong on. And getting these steps right sets me up for a better chance at success in the ones that follow. Each new stage still slows me down, but I’m getting further each time, and when I do start over it’s only a matter of minutes to get caught up and try the new algorithm again.
Around 10:30, I get all the way to the final stage of the Rubik’s Cube, where everything is in place minus the four corners. My online guide warns, “This proved to be the most confusing step, so read the instructions and follow the steps carefully.”
Great.
“It will look like you've messed up the whole cube but don't worry; it will be all right when all the corner pieces are oriented.” I take a deep breath and begin, but while it quickly looks messed up, the “all right” part of the promise doesn’t happen. It gets more and more not right until it’s clear all my solving has been undone yet again, and I’m back at square—or cube—one.
***
Texas was still up in the air, but in the meantime, I’d planned a quick getaway for the end of March, the first weekend of spring. As the date got closer, the forecast had gotten steadily worse. Two days out, the chance of rain had risen to 100 percent with a high of fifty degrees—not ideal for our day-one itinerary to see the cherry blossoms and museum hop in D.C.—and I got a text from my mom with more bad news. “I’m so sorry, but I think I have to back out of the trip this weekend …” I sunk my face into my hands and sighed.
I reassured myself that we’d just been in D.C. two years ago; it was familiar and not that far from home. And it was too late to change course now.
Sunday morning, we walked down the hallway to check out of our hotel, and I registered that I wasn’t a human packhorse—the kids were managing their own luggage. We loaded up the car for day two of the adventure.
Crossing a busy downtown street between the garage where I’d parked and the National Aquarium, Gracie commented, “Baltimore looks like Washington, D.C.”
“Yeah, I can see that. It has tall buildings and lots of people and cars just like D.C.,” I said, when something clicked in my head. Two major cities in two days, and here we were striding confidently toward the next adventure without a single worry. I held two hands and wore a belt bag strapped across my chest—no stroller, no diaper bag, no nap time to crunch our schedule. I was doing it.
***
I get the Rubik’s Cube back to the final stage, quickly this time, and read over the guide’s directions again.
“You are so close to the end, so be careful because this is the step in this tutorial where most people get lost. If this description doesn't make sense, check out a few examples here.” I click the link for extra help and see where I went wrong.
Then this time when I try, the colors look all messed up just for a bit, then order returns and the final piece clicks into its proper place.
A wide grin blossoms on my face, and I’m tempted to go wake up Logan and show him. Instead, I carry the cube up to my nightstand and go to sleep.
In the morning, I triumphantly present the perfect Rubik’s Cube back to Logan, who immediately mixes it up again.
In the weeks that follow, he and I fall into a rhythm. He plays with the cube until it’s too far gone for him to retrace his steps and leaves it somewhere for me to find—on the bathroom counter, next to my desk, or on the kitchen table. Then I solve it while he’s at school and place it somewhere I know he’ll see it when he gets home—on his nightstand, on the steps, or next to the charging station for school iPads.
My solving time shrinks exponentially down to five minutes on average, and I don’t even need to reference the written algorithms until I’m halfway through the puzzle. The final step feels like magic every time.
I keep fiddling with our summer plans for Texas, too, researching flights, hotels, and Airbnbs. My parents can’t come with us, but I think back to 2020, when a vacation with the kids on my own felt impossible, and look at how far we’ve come, even pulling off a whirlwind weekend in D.C. and Baltimore, just the four of us.
A couple of days into April, settled into my new job post-merger, I pull up the travel site I’ve got bookmarked on my lunch break and book four round-trip tickets. I get up to refill my water bottle and notice Logan’s Rubik’s Cube on the counter, all jumbled up.
Cube in hand, I walk back over to my desk to solve it once more.
Guest post written by Laura Leinbach. Laura is a single mom of three who logs 40+ hour weeks as a marketing and user experience professional and is slowly coming around to the idea that “work-life balance” doesn’t actually exist. Unread emails and red notification bubbles make her twitchy, and lattes from the local coffee shop are her favorite little luxury. When she's not working or chasing after little ones, she flexes her creative muscles by writing, cooking, and updating her century-old fresh-start home. Follow along on Instagram.
Photo by Jennifer Floyd.