I used to study your mouth, the way the lips parted as you spoke, gently, prodding reminders of what I might be forgetting as a mother. Watching the stillness of the mouth as you pressed the stethoscope to the baby’s bare chest and concentrated on the rhythms of his body. Measuring your breaths as you asked what sounds the baby is making, what he eats and how much of it, whether he ever tugs on his ears, how long he cries in the night.
But now, there is nowhere to look but the eyes. It feels more like an inspection of the mother than the baby now, a peering inwards, the way you watch and wait, eyes flickering from baby to mama, the KN95 masking the movement of the lips, the tongue, the breath. Or were you always studying us, and we just didn’t notice before?
I fidget as you observe me, the way my eyes are glistening as you tell me his ears are still infected, still full of pressure, still no response to the medicine or the other medicine or the other medicine, and that the only other medicine we could try is in a nationwide shortage so we probably couldn’t get that one, anyway. I think that you are trying to determine if I’m about to have a breakdown, if child protective services should be called, if I am unfit for this child. I assure you, I am not neglectful; I am just a mother, living in this world, trying to survive it.
I wonder—how many mothers do you watch in this chair, watch them fidget, watch them cry, watch them break? How many of us are on the verge of it all? How many of us are more unsure of ourselves than before, of our decisions, to keep the kids home or to entrust them with someone else, to mask them or not, to vaccinate them or not, to turn on the news or not, to think of how a gunman could kill a child, to really think of it and think of the mothers with the empty toddler beds at the end of their hallways. To think of the screams. To think of the silence.
How many mothers unspool themselves here? The torn threads they’re hanging on by spilling out into a thousand silky, wet puddles of doubt. The pediatrician’s office becomes a haven. This is where we rush when the schools call about a fever, when the fall off the couch sounds like a cracking, when the swelling begins.
I imagine the invisible yarn of the collective mothers’ anxieties swirling about in concentric circles, looping and swooping overtop mounting piles and filling the space between the walls. This thread is for the infant whose fever won’t break, that one there is for the toddler having night terrors. The exhaustion of a mother staying up all night unwinds itself into a softness as light as silk.
Rainbows of lavender thread and thick ashen gray wool woven together in braids, a fibrous cotton blend in cobalt draping itself over the examination table. The children cry when the swabs enter their nostrils, they rasp out breaths as you listen to their lungs. The mothers calm them with pacifiers and stuffed animals and whispers.
Filaments of forest green strands dripping onto the infant scale, an amber maze of cashmere twirled around the door handles. I imagine the yarn and how it spreads, how it chokes us, how we spin it from our breasts like milk. How we let it empty us.
Annie Marhefka (she/her) is a writer in Baltimore, Maryland whose recent publications have appeared in Pithead Chapel, Variant Literature, Reckon Review, Literary Mama, and more. Her writing 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 empowering women-identifying writers. She has a BA in creative writing from Washington College and an MBA. Follow Annie on Instagram @anniemarhefka, X @charmcityannie, and at anniemarhefka.com.
JMWW 
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