“If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one, it should be fired.” —Anton Chekhov
If a Lego is left on the floor in the first act, then in the following one, the mother will step on it.
If the mother writes an organic, spiritual, all-natural birth plan in the first act, in the second act, that same birth plan will fly out the window as the anesthesiologist plugs in her Triple Strength Super Max Turbo Blasted Epidural.™
Any cylindrical object, like a paper towel tube, introduced in the first act will be used in the second act as a wand or a sword to mete out a harsh brand of sibling justice.
If slime is introduced in the first act, the mother will be removing it from a child’s hair or an animal’s fur in the second act.
In the first act, if a colicky baby falls asleep for the first time in seventeen hours, a delivery driver will ring the doorbell in the next act, triggering the dog’s apocalyptic response.
If the mother purchases a sofa in the first act, in the second act, the child will enter their Jackson Pollock era, favoring the tomato-sauce-on-upholstery medium.
When the mother sees a left-behind, forgotten diaper bag on the kitchen counter in the first act, during the second act the other parent will be somewhere in public, experiencing a diaper blowout so large and liquid that it makes the world tremble.
If the mother finds time to schedule her first haircut in eight months in the opening act, the school will announce a lice outbreak in the next act.
If scissors are left unattended on a low counter in the first act, in the second act, every doll in the house will have the shaved head of a radical feminist audience member of the Ani DiFranco concert at Lilith Fair circa 1997.
If a sleepover invitation occurs in the first act, in the second act, the mother will be summoned from sleep by a phone call at 2 a.m.
If the mother takes a sleeping pill in the first act, a child will appear at the foot of her bed in the next act to announce that they have to make a replica of the Taj Mahal out of salt dough for a school project. It’s due the next morning, and the mother will not have the correct supplies.
If a road trip is announced in the first act, someone will barf in the second act.
If a small child overhears the mother gossiping in the first act, in the following act, they’ll run into the subject of the gossip at the grocery store, and the child will say, “My mom said you’re a foot-faced loser!”
If the mother feels herself coming down with a cold in the first act, in the second act, the father will suddenly have the same sickness but much worse, and he will need to lie down indefinitely.
If the mother is diagnosed with sleep apnea and receives a CPAP machine in the first act, her teen, in the second act, will upload a video to TikTok of her sleeping, edited together with oxygen mask footage from Blue Velvet. It will have 5.3 million views by the third act.
A young girl in Act I rolls her eyes and vows, “I’ll never be anything like my mother.” In Act II, she will catch herself saying to her own child, “If it were a snake, it would have bitten ya,” or, “I thought you were lying dead in a ditch somewhere!” It won’t be until Act III, when her own daughter, now grown, calls for tips on getting tomato sauce out of upholstery, that she will realize there were never any dramatic plot twists, only generations of mothers acting out the unavoidable fates that were written for them long ago.