Here's to Absurdist Playwrights, Who Do, To My Surprise, Get It Right

There are moments in my life when i think, oh, i get it, this is like that point in a play when i'm reading it or watching it and think what in the world? who breaks down at a place like that? it makes no sense, what kind of absurdist play is this. like for instance when a mother has just spent two days in the hospital with her 1-year-old daughter seeing her get poked and prodded with needles and IVs and having her baby cry so hard she vomits and her eyes get so puffy they are a continual squint and sitting for hours, like 6 at a time, in a rickety, broken recliner with her daughter in her arms because the baby girl won't sleep anywhere else as her daughter's head keeps bumping the wooden armrest (a wooden armrest. are you kidding me? she thinks) because the towels the mother draped over it to cushion her daughter's head have for the fifteenth time slipped onto the floor which is too far down for her to reach over the wooden armrest and retrieve and because actually getting up to get them requires simply too great an outlay of effort and maneuvering around cords and IV drips and blankets and bags and the rickety recliner with the wooden armrests so she just abandons the hope and arches her arm to protect her daughter's head in such a way that her arm cramps and prevents her from being able to sleep, which is the second night in a row because the previous night her baby girl threw up every hour but somehow through all this she is chipper, even chatty, and as she and her mom and her recently released baby girl step out of the car she even thinks, wow, what a beautiful day, only to come home to a huge renovation project, in fact installing shelving and drawers in her daughter's bedroom (huge meaning the entire den has been overtaken with all the recently purchased hardware) but in fact instead of deflating she finds she's excited about it and feels something like a subtle fleeting hope, an opportunity to exert some control over the chaos, to instill order and serenity, a subconscious sense that this project will in fact reclaim, recover and restore the last four days of sickness hell she's been living in, i can't wait, she thinks, only to discover that the final, aesthetic piece of the project was entirely overlooked by the "specialist" with whom she spent at least 90 minutes three days ago, which discovery prompts her to fly into a rage at the customer service guy on the phone, a pure, unmitigated rage about how the "specialist" forgot the birch, how in god's name could she have forgotten the birch, and then being told that in fact having the birch will require completely redesigning the closet at which point she nearly spits into the phone or at the phone and then apologizes to the customer service guy and explains that she's just returned home from being in the hospital for two days with her daughter and this was the project she had planned to tackle today and at this point she really can't think straight and needs to just hang up and think about it and may just return everything and go somewhere else after which confession there is a pause and she hears, on the other end of the line, very softly, what can we do to help you, and for some reason she almost dissolves into tears as she struggles through the rest of the conversation, chokes over her email address and hangs up the phone and then does utterly dissolve into tears and it's at this point if it were a play that i'd be thinking, what is she doing? why is she crying because the Container Store guy is offering to help her? this is absurd. this is why i hate absurdist plays, but since it's actually not a play but my life instead after i finish crying i think, oh. I get it now. and i wipe my eyes and sink back into the couch and think about it for a while, while the mascara dries on my hand and my husband is upstairs giving my daughter a bath after yet another sickness mess. yes. this is actually when people break down. not at the places I think they should or would, when i watch or read their lives. not at the climax of what I think the pain or the struggle is, but later, when everything has apparently died down and made a turn for the better. later, when all that's left to do is the next thing in a normal day. that's when emotions are paper thin and some small inconvenience represents every huge one, and some minor kindness represents the absence of more significant ones and suddenly after a bit of sun and a lull in the drama some stranger with one sentence trips a wire or flips a switch triggering an elaborate emotional Rube Golderb contraption of frustrations and struggles and triumphs and hopes and disappointments which ends with me sobbing silently on the couch.

and then thinking, life is an absurdist play. I can't wait to direct one.