The Jigsaw Puzzle

My twenty two year old autistic son Matthew had an impressive meltdown last summer that could so easily have been prevented.

Tall, handsome and wiry with sandy blonde hair and earnest brown eyes, he came bolting from the kitchen, where he had been talking to my husband, Peter. He picked up a dining room chair, and threw it across the room, smashing it into pieces.

“Whoa, calm down,” I said to my son who by now was in tears.

“It’s all Dad’s fault!” he cried, his forehead twisted in anguish and his shoulders shaking. “He wouldn’t sing all the verses!”

“Look, Matthew,” Peter said sternly, “I told you I had work to do, and that I would only sing the first two verses of Yankee Doodle Dandy.” My husband was wearing a Yale sweatshirt. It took tremendous self-control to keep from laughing.

“This might be a stupid question,” I said, biting my lower lip to keep from smiling, “but how many verses are there?”

“Including the chorus?” Peter huffed, “about eighteen.”

“But you sang all of the verses last night,” Matthew wailed, “and we were happy!”

It became clear to me that there was more to the meltdown than the Yankee Doodle song. Our son had had a tough day, and I had neglected to share the details with my husband.

Matthew had gone to the dentist that day and had two cavities filled. Then, with his mouth full of Novocain, he rode is bike to the local grocery story to deliver a gift-a jigsaw puzzle-to a young woman who worked there. Matthew had wrapped the puzzle painstakingly with lavender and white butterfly paper and used almost an entire roll of tape. When he handed her the gift, she accepted it politely and went back to work.

“How’d it go?” I asked Matthew when he returned less than twenty minutes after he left.

“Fine,” he said quietly, then went to his room to listen to the Beatles on his boom box. My heart ached for my socially awkward son, who yearned for a relationship like all young men his age.

If I had shared Matthew’s story with my husband, our dining room chair would have stayed intact. Peter would have had the opportunity to help Matthew, perhaps sharing the story about the time he gave a girl a rabbit’s foot in the eighth grade, and she laughed in his face.

At the very least, they could have sung all eighteen verses of Yankee Doodle Dandy.

And then they would have been happy.

LAURA

Laura Shumaker (www.laurashumaker.com) is the author of A REGULAR GUY: GROWING UP WITH AUTISM and a contributor to A CUP OF COMFORT FOR PARENTS OF CHILDREN WITH SPECIAL NEEDS.

She writes each Friday for www.5minutesforspecialneeds.com.

I'm the mother of three boys. The oldest, Matthew, is autistic and I've been writing about my experience raising him from babyhood to young adulthood for about 4 years. I've read my stories on NPR and published them in magazines, newspapers and anthologies, including VOICES OF AUTISM. My book A REGULAR GUY: GROWING UP WITH AUTISM was recently published and is being very well received!! I'm a fifth generation Californian and live in the San Francisco Area with my husband and three sons.