What Basically Fine Means to the Woman in the Waiting Room

Nobody talks about the waiting room.

Not the physical one — though I spent enough time in that one to know every detail of it. The chairs. The particular quality of the light. The way time moves differently in a hospital waiting room than it does anywhere else on earth — slower and faster at the same time, thick with the specific anxiety of not knowing and not being able to do anything about the not knowing.

I mean the waiting room in the broader sense. The one you live in when someone you love is going through something hard and your job — your entire job, the only job available to you — is to wait. To be present. To hold things together on the outside so that the person going through the hard thing has one less thing to worry about.

I am very good at holding things together on the outside.

I’ve been doing it my whole life in the way that a lot of women do it — quietly, efficiently, without making it a production, because making it a production takes energy away from the actual holding together and the holding together is what matters.

When my daughter got her diagnosis, I held it together.

I held it together in the doctor’s office and on the drive home and in the phone calls to family and in every conversation with Sherry where my job was to be calm so she could feel whatever she needed to feel without also having to manage my feelings on top of her own. I held it together through the surgery prep and the surgery and the recovery and the long, uncertain season that followed.

I held it together so well that I’m not sure anyone knew how hard I was holding.

Here’s what I know about the woman in the waiting room that nobody talks about: she has her own version of basically fine that she arrived at through a completely different door than the person going through the hard thing.

Sherry’s basically fine came from surviving something herself. From finding out she was stronger than she knew. From coming through the other side of the hardest season of her life and discovering that she was still herself — still there, still capable, still moving toward everything she wanted.

My basically fine came from surviving watching her go through it.

Which is its own kind of hard. Not harder — I want to be careful here, I would have traded places with her in a heartbeat and she knows that. But its own kind. The particular difficulty of loving someone completely and being unable to protect them from the thing that’s happening. Of having to trust the doctors and the process and ultimately something larger than either of those while also making sure everyone is fed and informed and not falling apart in the hallways.

I found my basically fine in the small things.

In the cup of coffee that was exactly right on a morning when nothing else was. In the text from a friend who didn’t ask how Sherry was doing but asked how I was doing — just me, the mom, the one in the waiting room. In the moment, somewhere in the middle of the recovery, when I looked at my daughter and saw her laughing — really laughing, the full version, the one I’d been waiting for — and felt something release in me that I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.

Basically fine is what you arrive at when you’ve been holding it together for so long that you forget to check in with yourself about whether you actually are fine. And then one day you do check in. And you find out that you are. Not because everything is perfect. Because you are still yourself, still standing, still the woman who held it together when it mattered and came out the other side with her family intact and her heart still working.

That’s basically fine from the waiting room.

It looks different from where Sherry stands. It took a different path. It has a different texture.

But it’s the same destination.

And I am so glad we both made it here.