Yesterday evening, I had a text conversation with my god-sister. Every time I talk to her I get that sense of calm, belonging, peace one gets with the very best of people. We discussed grief and hope. We talked about a number of things deep and heart-wrenching, immediately getting to the core of things as we always do.
One of the topics we tackled was how children born into chaos, raised in chaos, having their brains washed in the chemicals of chaos longterm will grow-up and create chaos. She calls them chaos babies. I’ll call them chaos kids. If things are too settled for too long, they will break things apart to feel “normal.” Calm. Peace. Consistency. Those are foreign. They feel wrong. They are unsettling.
I’m sure you’ve met folks who baffle the mind–things are going great, everything rowing in a decent direction, they’re about to conquer some long-standing problems and then BAM! Destruction. Self-destruction. If there isn’t a crisis, they will create it out of whole cloth just to get back to familar territory.
Both my god-sister and I had enough childhood chaos in our respective upbringings that we could very well have gone down that path. So what makes the difference? A lot of love and luck, I reckon. I won’t discount financial stability and education, but dang, I’ve met people with PhDs and money enough and they are still chaos agents. How does one navigate a world where some want chaos and others want peace?
I’m so thankful for meeting, courting with, marrying, loving, being with someone who was stable and sought that peace and consistency, who came home to me and told me “it is calm with you.” There is also something to be said for swimming against the current of one’s familiar waters for something different. Choice is powerful.
Feryl Files 