We do not speak to each other but we know.
The ones who are there for their mothers, which you can tell from a particular quality of the waiting, a quality that is different from waiting for yourself, that has a different kind of attention in it, a more external alertness, the eyes moving to the door more frequently, the body slightly forward in the chair rather than settled back. We can identify each other. We are all in the chairs. We are all holding the book we are not reading or the phone we are not looking at. We are all waiting for a door.
We are a particular generation of women.
Born into the generation that was told we could have everything, which was both true and not true in the ways that most things that are both true and not true turn out to be, which is that the having of everything came with a cost that the telling did not include. We could have the career and the family and the life that was larger than our mothers’ lives, and we did, and the larger life turned out to include the caring for the mothers while also doing everything else the larger life required, which meant the everything was genuinely everything, was the career and the children and the parents and the household and the self that was somewhere in the middle of all of it, waiting for a turn that sometimes came and sometimes did not.
We are in the waiting room.
The literal one and the ongoing one. The chair with the book and the door that opens with news we cannot control and the returning home after to the rest of the everything that continues regardless. We are doing this without a roadmap because our mothers’ generation did not make this trip in quite the same way, did not live long enough or did not have daughters in quite the same position, and so we are making the map as we go, in the waiting rooms, in the parking lots, in the kitchens where we make the soup and pack the bags and hold the coats.
The woman across from me has a book I have read.
I almost say so. I do not. But the almost-saying is its own form of connection, the recognition that we are the same kind of person doing the same kind of thing on the same kind of Tuesday, and the recognition is enough, the knowing-without-saying is its own solidarity, and I carry her with me a little when I leave, this woman whose name I do not know, whose mother I will never meet, who was in the chairs when I was in the chairs and whose not-quite-reading felt, for a waiting-room hour, like company.
