I was overwhelmed looking at the tiny pieces scattered all over my kitchen table. One day all these little tiles will come together to form a picture. Today it’s just a cacophony of trivial pieces of blanks and tabs screaming for connection. I’m overwhelmed and anxious having no idea how long it’s going to take to complete the jigsaw puzzle. At this stage, the task seems daunting.
My life as a mom of a child with a disability
This is exactly how I would describe my life as a mom of a child with a disability. At the beginning of my journey, I was given a ton of information. A lot of random bits of data that didn’t necessarily correlate with each other. And I was overwhelmed because I had no idea what to do and where to start. It was hard trying to make sense of it all.
It was like I was given a bunch of puzzle pieces but not the box it came in. I had no idea what the completed picture was supposed to look like based on just looking at the tiles. Initially, there was a lot of guessing, and a lot of trial and error because I had no clue what I was doing. It’s hard to complete a puzzle when you don’t know what it’s supposed to look like.
The incomplete puzzle
But as time progressed, I began to make sense of some of the pieces and I was able to connect a few. Soon I was able to join enough to form areas where I could almost make out an image. But not quite, there were still a lot of unknowns. There were still many pieces I didn’t know what to do with because I had no idea what it was and where it would fit.
Pieces like my son’s rare genetic disorder and all the uncertainty that comes with it. Doctors and geneticists definitely understand more now than 25 years ago but they’re still learning. Still discovering. And the more answers they uncover the more questions they have. I’m not sure if we will ever have all the answers.
Then there are those puzzle pieces related to my son that I can’t make heads or tails of. Due to my son’s inability to communicate in a way I can understand, he’s still a mystery. There’s so much about him I don’t know. I can guess but that’s all it is: An educated guess. These are tiles I don’t know what to do with. Tiles that are hard to understand and decipher, so they hang out by the side of the puzzle, prepetually on hold.
Accepting the incomplete puzzle
It’s been many years since I started to work on this puzzle and I’ve come to accept all the ambiguous pieces. It’s part and parcel of my journey, a given when having a son with a rare genetic disorder and limited communication. It makes me appreciate and cherish the pieces that do fit together so much more. And I know without any doubt that one day every single puzzle tile will connect. There’s no need to force them or make them fit. One day this mess of random pieces will come together to form a picture that will make sense.
And while I wait, my job is to finish my part of the puzzle and put together those pieces that fit, instead of focusing on the ones that don’t. The reality is, that no matter how much I’d like to see the puzzle finished, it may not be completed here on Earth. After all, God not only holds the puzzle box but also the final tile that completes the picture.