Great piece. I was going crazy halfway through: “JUST TELL ME THE SECRET. I NEED IT!” and then I completely loved the fireplace analogy.

It hit home, because we tried to 100% heat our Washington home with a fireplace while also parenting an infant and managing post-partum depression. It was waaay too hard, the fire going out every night, one of us trying to restart it again every morning with cold fingers, and a baby.

Then we got a pellet stove. It doles out teensy bits of wood slowly, but constantly. Sometimes we’d also light the wood stove, and get even hotter, but the pellet stove kept us warm every day.