My son is a hoarder.  Maybe not a certifiable, diagnostic case (not yet, anyway), but he’s a hoarder. I’m sure of it.

His bedroom drawers are littered with what appears to outside observers to be junk — scraps of construction paper, daycare projects from his first year of life, old receipts stolen from grocery store bags — despite my decree that he only get one drawer in which to keep all his treasured articles.

Every couple of months, when I’m putting away laundry or double checking that he’s cleared things off his dresser so the cleaning lady can polish it when she comes, I find that his prized possessions have migrated out of their designated home, multiplied, and taken up residence in what used to be his sock or pajama drawers, so squished in their quarters that several keepsakes appear to be wriggling out of their makeshift prisons in hopes of jumping to freedom.  He insists these relics are all “very special” to him, but to me?  To me, they’re my sanity’s nemeses.

This hoarding seems to defy all other aspects of his personality.  By all accounts, he is a clean and tidy person.  He never lets the dogs go in his bedroom for fear they might leave dog hair on his bedspread or carpeting.  He is adamant about brushing and flossing his teeth multiple times per day (what kid flosses so regularly?).  He can’t stand it when his hands are sticky, when he gets dirt on his feet, or when sunscreen touches his hair.

So what’s with this messy, cluttered hoarding business?

I suspect a large part of the problem rests with his extreme sensitivity and sentimentality.  Ever since birth, the kid has been stressed out, longing to return to whatever circumstance from whence he just came.

When my father first saw him in the hospital, he walked over to him, massaged the scowl already affixed to his 2-day-old brow, and told him to relax — that life outside the womb wasn’t that bad.

When we return from vacations or a night away at a friend’s house, he sits in his bed, weeping and sobbing that he wants to go back — that he isn’t ready for the fun to be done. So when it comes to his school projects, home crafts, and self-created toys fashioned from household scraps, it’s no wonder he wants to keep them all.  They are each permanent reminders of an enjoyable time in his life — of a moment, a feeling, that is gone forever.

Sentimental or not, we can’t keep everything we make and do in our lives (especially when we’re only a kid), which is why every so often, I make him clean out his drawers and organize his things into 3 piles: the keeper pile, the maybe pile, and the discard pile, the latter of which remains small until, after much debate and resistance, he forcibly moves items from the former into it.

The process is a painful one for him.  It always begins with tortured whining and a mild temper tantrum until, eventually, he accepts that he’s not getting out of the task and begins, ever so slowly, pulling each artifact out of safekeeping for careful examination and consideration.  It takes hours, this sorting, for he must bring each item in to me and relive his experience with it, poring over its features with pride and recounting exactly where he was and what he was doing at its inception.

In the end, we are able to pare down the pile, just barely enough to fit into its sanctioned holding place, but not without our share of fits and fights, and not without me questioning whether or not what I’m doing is the right thing.

In my head, I know he needs to learn to organize and prioritize, but in my heart?  In my heart, I can’t help but feel like this task is nothing more than an exercise designed to take away a bit of his innocence and his soul, one discard pile item at a time.

And that’s a rotten feeling for both of us to have.