CNF: To the woman in the waiting room with the feverish child
by Annie Marhefka
I pretend not to see you, not to notice, because that’s what we’re supposed to do, spare you a look of pity, pretend you are invisible.
But I see you. I want to tell you that I see you, that I’ve been you.
I see how your eyelids flutter as your child’s limbs shake like tree branches about to detach from the torso, his tattered blanket haphazardly wrapped around him. I imagine you probably grabbed it instinctively as you rushed out the door, panicking about what else you may have forgotten. I see the way your hair is matted to scalp, that new wrinkle under your eye, the way you haven’t slept in days. I see the dark stain just below the neckline of your shirt, maybe milk, or oatmeal, or the stickiness of a dose of grape-flavored medicine spat back out at you. I see the way your own hands tremble as you rub his feet, the way you tuck his hair behind his ear, as if that will quell his shivering aches. I see the way you whisper to him that it’s going to be okay, the way you try and convince yourself. I see the way you’re holding back, the way your body looks like it might splinter into pieces from the weight of it all.
I bet that you have learned how to cry without making a sound in the deepest, loneliest pit of night, opened your mouth into the shape of a roar, jaws spread like birthing hips, silently fed your pain to the darkness.
Annie Marhefka is a writer in Baltimore, Maryland whose writing has been published by Lunch Ticket, Fatal Flaw Lit, Literary Mama, The Citron Review, and others, and her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Annie is the Executive Director at Yellow Arrow Publishing, a Baltimore-based nonprofit supporting and empowering women-identifying writers. She has a degree in creative writing from Washington College. Follow Annie on Instagram @anniemarhefka, Twitter @charmcityannie, and at anniemarhefka.com.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “To the woman in the waiting room with the feverish child”? I drafted notes for this piece on the notes app of my phone while in a pediatrician’s waiting room. There was a woman across the room from me, and her child was sicker than mine, and I just felt for her so deeply. These past few years have been so tough on mothers and I think there is a bit of camaraderie felt in all that we have survived and are surviving together, even though we don’t know each other. This piece is part of a collection of essays I’ve written to strangers over the last year, all centering around holding compassion for the stories we hold inside ourselves.
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