Diary of an Order Muppet
Dear Friends,
I’m sitting in front of my vanity mirror trying to smooth my hair. The brush catches. The straightener clicks to life, ready to bring order to that one stubborn wave on the right side of my head. I look in the mirror and begin to see a presentable version of myself.
It’s almost a peaceful moment if you don’t know about the trade I’ve had to make to experience it.
Around me on the floor is every scarf I own. (And as a therapy-adjacent writer, you know I have a lot of scarves.) My daughter wraps some of them around her body like a cape. Others she ties into knots. Others disappear into her plush backpack, never to be seen again.
“New Kitty is moving, and I’m packing her blankets,” my daughter tells me. (New Kitty is her beloved stuffy who is not new, and is beginning to resemble not so much a kitty as Frankenstein’s monster with more stitches than original seams.)
This, I realize lately, is the way of things: I’m constantly trading order for chaos.
If I’m going to do my hair, I must permit scarf mayhem. In order to clean my kitchen, I acknowledge and accept that my toddler is destroying the living room. Half an hour of answering emails requires me to scrape PlayDoh out of the upholstery. One folded load of laundry costs one emptying of the kitchen gadget drawer.
An Instagram friend of mine, Australian artist Michelle Harvey, posted a photo of tracks her cat had made walking through paint in her studio. Michelle’s paintings are incredible–vast landscapes that seem to go on forever until you see the clouds above dwarfing the ground, gigantic, holding something like calm and anger all at once.
The paw prints trail off the table. How far did the cat manage to get?
“Hope you found her before she destroyed your carpet,” I commented.
“I can’t complain,” Michelle said. “I’m getting so much paint on the walls myself. We’re making a real mess of a lovely room.”
“Trading chaos of space for order on the canvas,” I said.
Earlier this month, I got the ultimate brush with orderliness–a reunion trip with my best friends from college. There were the outer luxuries of order: a nice hotel room, pedicures. There was the quiet of a weekend not spent parenting. There was the healing of my weary mom-heart over coffee with women who know and love me fully.
And to have this peace, order, and much-needed time with friends, what was spinning into chaos just off the screen?
“I had to rock her to sleep at 8PM and she woke up at 5:45 this morning,” my husband texted.
There it is.
“Rock her to sleep???”
My leggy three-year old, all 35 lbs of her, now wanted to be cradled in my husband’s arms as he stood swaying beside her bed, a position she hasn’t needed for falling asleep since she was an infant.
Much like my suitcase at the beginning of the trip (packing cubes, sub-divided toiletries), my daughter’s night-time routine began to stray further and further from order the longer I was away. (Who needs packing cubes when it’s all just dirty laundry? Hope this shampoo bottle doesn’t puncture on the way home…)
I think often of Dahlia Lithwick’s 2012 piece on Muppet Theory, by which every human can be classified as an Order Muppet or a Chaos Muppet:
“Chaos Muppets are out-of-control, emotional, volatile. They tend toward the blue and fuzzy. They make their way through life in a swirling maelstrom of food crumbs, small flaming objects, and the letter C. Cookie Monster, Ernie, Grover, Gonzo, Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and—paradigmatically—Animal, are all Chaos Muppets. Zelda Fitzgerald was a Chaos Muppet. So, I must tell you, is Justice Stephen Breyer.
Order Muppets—and I’m thinking about Bert, Scooter, Sam the Eagle, Kermit the Frog, and the blue guy who is perennially harassed by Grover at restaurants (the Order Muppet Everyman)—tend to be neurotic, highly regimented, averse to surprises and may sport monstrously large eyebrows…
It’s not that any one type of Muppet is inherently better than the other. (Order Muppets do seem to attract the ladies, but then Chaos Muppets collect the chicken harems.) It’s simply the case that the key to a happy marriage, a well-functioning family, and a productive place of work lies in carefully calibrating the ratio of Chaos Muppets to Order Muppets within any closed system...”
While I’m an Order Muppet (see my latest obsession with rug-cleaning videos), three-year-olds are, by nature of their brain development, Chaos Muppets. This applies even if they’re actually an Order Muppet trapped in brain chaos–my daughter was, after all, attempting to pack for New Kitty’s impending move.
She is, perhaps, the illusion of chaos. And like its counterpart, order can also be an illusion.
Laundry, for instance. It regenerates too quickly to be real order, even if the drawers look neat when you fold t-shirts like Marie Kondo.
Rage cleaning, I learned this week, is also the illusion of order. If you’re not familiar with “rage cleaning,” it’s the label I’ve now learned for when I cannot engage in kid tantrums anymore and instead decide to hand-wash dishes that could get perfectly clean in the dishwasher.
Rage cleaning is a symptom of nervous system dysregulation, the internet tells me. Okay, rude.
“When we feel disarray in our mental or emotional world, the easiest or most concrete way to counter that is to make our physical world tidy and neat, the way we want our mental world to be,” says clinical psychologist Tracy Hejmanowski, PhD.
Turns out sometimes seeking order just means you’re chaos on the inside.
Order and chaos, of course, are all about control, a topic I’ve considered extensively. And up until this point, I’ve been firmly in the camp of “Order is Good, but Control is Bad, but Chaos is ALSO Bad,” a worldview that, as this rambling sentence suggests, is neither realistic nor healthy.
I’ve always thought of order and chaos like that image of keeping all the balls in the air–they can’t all stay up, so you need to know which ones bounce and which ones are made of glass. God forbid something shatters.
Or like the old triangle we all saw at some academic orientation or another. The menace of CHOOSE TWO:
I’ve viewed chaos as a stressful frustration. An inevitable part of life, which, if I only had better balance, I could wrangle.
When I was a kid, my mother’s solution to the chaos of kid clutter was a cardboard box she called “The Black Hole.” It served as purgatory between floor clutter and the Goodwill donation bin. If we left something out for too long, despite multiple requests to clean it up, my mother put it into The Black Hole. To retrieve it, we kids had to succumb to order: one chore earned you the right to look into The Black Hole and see what was there. A second chore allowed you to reclaim one item.
As I remember it, The Black Hole’s chore system worked well when a toy was especially beloved. If a Barbie or a stuffed cat got sucked into the vortex, I’d sacrifice life and limb (Windexing windows, perhaps) to get it back. But mostly, things disappeared and we didn’t notice. Off they went to Goodwill after a while, and no one was any the wiser.
My mother, in addition to being master of the cosmos, was a big believer in the idea that everything has a home.
The books go on the shelf. The vegetable peeler goes in the drawer. The keys go on the tray by the front door, and don’t come crying to me if you re-homed them and then forgot.
And chaos? It goes into The Black Hole, which had its own home on top of the refrigerator, alongside the green pitcher we used for iced tea.
I’m beginning to see that order, in its best form, requires letting go. You have to acknowledge that chaos is one natural state of things, and that it, too, has its place. It’s a useful bartering chip for something else that needs to get done. And it may, like my daughter running down the hall in a scarf cape, even have its own beauty. After all, as Lithwick warns, “Too many Order Muppets means no cookies for anyone.”
If order cannot also welcome chaos, it becomes dysregulation, panic, and anxiety. Sure, your dishes are clean, but are you processing your feelings or just avoiding them?
Chaos, too, belongs. It, too, has a home.
Take good care,
Dot
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Blog Posts
From the archives: HALT, an acronym for Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired, is a method Clinical Director Adele Stuckey recommends as a healthy coping strategy. In this blog, she details check-in questions for each letter that can help you prioritize your wellbeing.
Links We Like
For Order Muppets: The mental health benefits of spring cleaning. (I like the section on rituals). (Vogue)
And for Chaos Muppets: If you’re too exhausted for spring cleaning, there’s this.
You begin with what you know, and what you know changes.
What it’s like living with colorblindness.
A fascinating interview with Sara Petersen, the author of a book about Momfluencers: “There's no follow-up question to ‘I stay home with my kids.’ There's no curiosity. People think that they understand the whole of you based on that one sentence, which is…just a form of erasure.”
No one does beautiful chaos better than Christina Kwan:
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Well, just gonna go implement The Black Hole system in our household
(This Order Muppet grew up with "on the floor, out the door" and it's possible sometimes my brain is chaos because it had to have a home somewhere 🤷🏻♀️)