Choosing Chaos

Photo by Nick Page on Unsplash

Sometimes, when I realize that dinnertime is in five minutes and for some reason my dinner plan is no longer feasible, we have what we call a “chaos dinner.” Maybe there’s a key ingredient missing, or our delivery order got cancelled, or my partner and I each thought the other person had dinner under control, and I can feel my panic and blood pressure rising. Chaos dinner.

The only rule of chaos dinner is that everyone has to help clean up. But you can eat whatever you can find, wearing whatever you choose, in whatever location you prefer. Our very first dinner, my oldest tried to eat an entire meal upside-down while our youngest ran around naked except for her diaper, wearing a helmet over her butt. I don’t remember what anyone ate, but I assume it was mostly goldfish crackers.

I’ve been thinking about our chaos dinners, because I realized recently that I crave chaos even though I loathe drama. Drama often seems to find me, and I used to worry that I was the worst kind of cliché, a person who claims to hate drama but actually creates it at every opportunity. But it’s easy to confuse drama and chaos.

Fifteen years ago, when I married my ex, there was a LOT of drama. Just a few days before the wedding, her mom had a mental breakdown because there was going to be alcohol at our reception and declared that she wasn’t coming. She didn’t let my ex’s father come, either. On our honeymoon we got a call from my ex’s sister that their father looked unwell, and soon after he was diagnosed with Stage 4 colon cancer. He died less than a year later and was cremated in the suit he’d bought for our wedding. So you see what I mean about drama.

At the funeral, my brother-in-law’s girlfriend sought me out. I liked her, even though I didn’t know her well. She was was my father-in-law’s caretaker in the last months of his life, sneaking him pot when he had no appetite even though my ex’s mother never would have approved. She told me that she and my ex’s brother had gotten engaged and asked if I would be a bridesmaid. I hesitated, because we weren’t close and because I was nervous about being involved with any more weddings in my ex’s family. And then she added, “Oh, but you should know, it’s going to be a Wiccan handfasting, and I want all of my bridesmaids to wear fairy wings.”

At that point, my “Weeeeeell…” became a hard yes. Because while I’d rather stay far away from wedding drama, I can’t pass up the chaos of being a fairy bridesmaid.

(Ultimately, she chickened out, because she was worried — correctly — that her husband-to-be’s mother wouldn’t come to the wedding if it was too weird. So I ended up in a dress that had slightly Ren-Faire vibes and no wings. I refused to get the dress hemmed in protest and needed sky-high heels and ended up tripping over the acorns in the park and wiping out at least five times. They stayed married for less than a year, but I’m still annoyed about the winglessness over a decade later.)

Drama brings misery, although sometimes also growth. Chaos brings unanticipated joy.

I have yet to regret a decision I made for the sake of chaos. Creating a photo album that’s nothing but art my kids made that accidentally looks like dicks? Hilarious. Throwing my ex a going-away dinner before her gender-confirming surgery with tacos and a pink geode cake? An amazing experience for our whole family. Joining my younger sister’s dragon smut book club? Ruled. Offering to edit my partner’s high school girlfriend’s essay for the Mensa gathering in Bucharest about mistakes she made in polyamory? Best choice I made last month.

As we move into the new year — and I always think of September as the start of the New Year, because I’m Jewish and also an academic — I’m resolving to lean into the joyful chaos even as I lean out of drama. I can’t wait to see what unexpected fun it brings.