I May Never Know the Reason "Why"

Dominic has been fixated, you really could call it obsessed with calendars for several months. They cover part of our family room floor and if I try to move them or if the hubby, Lauren or I accidentally touch one, he gets upset. He spends hours on the floor looking at them and no matter how many times I try to redirect him to something else, like putting together a puzzle, he will tell me no, every single time. Last week, I asked him to hand me the March 2018 page from our master family calendar. This is what he handed me.

I asked him where the rest of the calendar was and he brought over a bunch of torn up pieces of paper, handed them to me and said, "fix it." I tried for about a half hour to "reconstruct," the calendar and then realized it was a futile effort. I told Dominic, "there are some things even tape can't fix." I didn't get mad at him because I knew there had to be a reason "why," he ripped up all those pieces of paper. I saw on another mom's blog about a month ago that her son with Autism "hoarded," items. When I think of hoarding, I picture rooms filled with so many things that you have to crawl over piles to get from room to room, not a pile of torn up pieces of our March calendar that currently reside under our family room couch. I know basically nothing about hoarding and "why," children with Autism do it. When Dominic went to his private speech therapist this past Saturday, I told her about what was going with the calendar and the pieces of paper. I then asked her if she had ever heard of children with Autism doing that type of thing. Her response back was yes. My next question was why. She told me it's a way to cope with stress and anxiety. Hmm, okay. When I have watched the shows on television about individuals that hoard, it makes no sense to the people coming in to help clean up the piles, but it makes total sense to the person that hoards. I asked Dominic several times tonight if I could toss all the pieces of ripped up paper that are under the couch into the trash. He told me no. I asked him if he could tell me why. He told me no. Do I really need to know why? No. Does his hoarding bring him comfort? Yes. Then, who am I to question "why" he does it?

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