I own a really great pair of kitchen scissors that my parents gave me for Christmas a couple years ago. They are unbelievably sharp and I wouldn’t be surprised if they could cut through my kitchen table if that’s what I wanted.They also can be taken apart so they can be washed or the blades sharpened.

And yesterday one half of the pair was missing.

I noticed it right before dinner. I opened a kitchen drawer and there sat one half of my kitchen scissors. I opened the dishwasher to see if I’d accidentally left the other half inside. Nope. I checked all the other drawers to see if it had been placed mistakenly in the wrong one. Wrong again. Hmmmm.

Then I knew. Adam had taken the missing blade. This is a new game of his. He likes to “help” and “fix” and “have that”. Those are phrases he is able to use pretty efficiently now. He’s also, at almost five, tall enough and smart enough to reach into cabinets and drawers and also manipulate locks and pretty much anything that the childproofing department of Target sells to keep toddlers away from dangerous household items.

He’s also sly enough to run off with these things and hide them, kind of like Helen Keller locking Anne Sullivan in her room and hiding the key. It’s a game. It gets him attention. It probably makes him feel powerful that he can outsmart all of the people in his life that, to him, seem to be only capable of saying “NO!” and “DON’T TOUCH!”.

For the most part, it’s just been a real inconvenience. He’s hidden his brothers’ Nintendo DS systems a couple times. He occasionally has hidden his shoes outside in the yard. He ran off with all of the scotch tape one day which wasn’t really a problem until I had to wrap a birthday gift. I just borrowed some from a neighbor.

But now a really sharp blade was missing and if I was correct in suspecting Adam, this was just all sorts of wrong. And while Adam, at almost five, possesses a fairly impressive vocabulary and even the ability to spell and write much of his vocabulary, it is just that. Vocabulary. You can ask him his name and he will tell you “Adam.” You can ask him what color Spongebob is and he will tell you “yellow”. Yet asking him things like how was your day at school, where did you hide the kitchen scissors and most importantly, do you understand the urgency of this situation…well, I don’t expect to get far. Autism gets in the way of these kinds of conversations.

Not that I wasn’t going to try, however. The next morning, I was on a mission.

“Adam,” I began as patiently as I could, because freaking out usually freaks him out. “Do you see this?” I held up the blade. “Do you know what this is?”   

He grinned big. “Scissors!”he proclaimed proudly.

“Does Adam play with scissors?”

“Adam cut with scissors!”

“What does Adam cut with scissors?”

Adam looked at me, then stuffed a bunch of Fruit Loops in his mouth and started rambling on about how b-u-s spells bus and how he’s going to be a skeleton for Halloween.

“Adam!” I forced eye contact with him. “Where are the other scissors? See these?”I showed him the half pair. “These are in this drawer. Where are the other ones?”

Adam smiled. Ate Fruit Loops. Turned the TV on and off. I didn’t know what to do. Missing Nintendos are one thing. A four year old playing with sharp objects is quite another. Dammit. Come on, Adam, help me out here. How can I get you to understand??

“Adam,” I tried once more, “Mommy wants these scissors. Can you go get them for Mommy? It will make Mommy so happy if you bring me the scissors.”                                                                                                                        

“Watch Spongebob?” Adam asked as he slid down from his kitchen stool and ran off, leaving me shaking my head and wondering in exactly which way this situation was going to end badly.

Five minutes later, I turned my head to see Adam coming downstairs, his favorite doll in one hand, the missing half pair of kitchen scissors in the other. He stopped and gave me a mischievous grin and I have to say, it made me think just a little of Michael Myers in the beginning of Halloween. I immediately ran over and took them from him before we had any chance of recreating that scene.

“Adam!” I hugged him. “Thank you for bringing me the scissors! Good job! You did it! These scissors need to stay in the kitchen. These are Mommy’s scissors!”

Adam laughed, looked me straight in the eye and said, “Mommy so happy!”

Yes, Mommy so happy. Mommy so relieved. Relieved because I had my scissors back and I’d just averted a potential seriously bad situation. A million different bad situations if you stop to imagine…

And also so relieved and happy because I’d just had a breakthrough moment with my autistic son. Sometimes they come in the most unsuspecting and unusual ways.

If only Anne Sullivan was around to give me a high five…

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