I have a pin that I wear on one of my jackets that was sent to me from one of the Autism organizations that I support. It is of a puzzle piece, a symbol used often for the questions surrounding Autism. This symbol has come under attack from some in the Autism community that find it too negative, but I have always felt it resonated with the reality of living life with someone on the Autism spectrum. Yes, there are positives to be found, but Micah has so many baffling behaviors and reactions that I would love to know the reasons behind them and ways to help him move to, dare I say, more “normal” ways of functioning.
The puzzle piece as a reflection of Micah’s life recently became a literal puzzle in our home. Perhaps mystery is a better word. As I have been transitioning into retirement, I have been given some lovely gifts from friends, co-workers and family. Among those gifts have been a few lovely puzzles, given by those who know that I like to relax by making puzzles. Once I start a puzzle it becomes a bit of an obsession; me working to conquer the puzzle by creating the scene on the box. It should be noted that I only do puzzles if I like the scene, as my fun is in creating it. Like most puzzlers, I start by finding all of the edge pieces and then work my way in. One of the most frustrating parts of working on a puzzle is to have it almost done and find that a piece or pieces are no where to be found. Over the last couple of years, this has been a constant, working on a brand new puzzle for hours to end by facing the reality that a piece or two or six have disappeared, never to be found. For years I have blamed the dog and the cat as culprits in the disappearance of the pieces. Despite heroic efforts to locate the pieces, they never have shown up, thus the conclusion that they got knocked off the puzzle table by the cat and were most likely eaten by the dog. Efforts to cover the puzzle with plywood when not working on it did not alleviate the missing pieces problem, a clue that I was missing the causal factor for quite some time.
This past month I began a puzzle with a lovely fall scene. I had the edge complete and about a fourth of the puzzle put together when I left it uncovered to attend a zoom meeting on my computer, not 10 feet away, but out of sight of my puzzle. When I returned from the meeting ready to resume puzzling I was shocked to see that several of the edge pieces were gone…no where to be found. When Dean came back in I frantically asked him if he had seen the pets near the puzzle table, he said no, but when he came in from outside, Micah was sitting on the end of the couch next to the puzzle table and was eating something. I immediately confronted Micah who at first said no, then yes, he had eaten the puzzle pieces. The challenge with those answers is that his yes/no responses do not always reflect the truth so I continued to interrogate him and he clearly knew that Mom was mad. Really mad. He was asked to go to his room early while I fumed over this latest crazy episode of Pica. Those of you who are not into puzzles are probably wondering why this behavior was such a big deal to me. I know in the scheme of life, there have been many other behaviors more troubling, but this one hinders my need to complete things. I also belatedly wondered how that cardboard would impact his digestive system. I continued to make the puzzle as I still wanted to finish it and realized as I forged onward that there were not just a few edge pieces that were gone, there were many pieces missing, never to be found.
I finished the puzzle as much to find how many pieces he consumed as to not let the missing pieces defeat me in my quest for completion. As I worked on the puzzle, I tried to fathom why he ate the pieces he did, was he perhaps mad that I was so focused on the puzzle that I was not as focused on him and something he wanted? Was it that the pieces looked like flowers or candy? I did note that the missing pieces were generally brighter in color and some were flower pieces. What ever the cause, from my estimation, about 35 pieces of the 10000 piece puzzle will never be seen again. And Micah, the keeper of this puzzle cannot tell me why.
Jan Lessard Peightell October 29, 2021
