Soothing the Soreness

A couple of days ago, my voice started acting up.
I felt fine.  I didn't have a fever.  I just sounded like an adolescent boy whose voice was changing.
I ignored it.
And of course it only got worse.
So today I gave in and went to the doctor, who commanded me to go home, take my medicine, and rest for the next two days.
I stopped by the store and stocked up on chicken-soupy stuff.  And I texted Hillary to see if she was home and wanted to have lunch with me.  Happily, she was...and she did!
And that's how I happened to be curled up in my favorite oversized chair with sunlight streaming in the windows sipping soup and listening to my beautiful grown up girl talk about enrolling for next semesters classes and the crazy funny things she and her friends were talking about lately.
Which somehow led to the subject of her beginnings with us.  An unplanned and very early surprise to me and her dad's teenaged selves.  And she asked the questions she hadn't asked so far.
Like "How did you tell Dad?"
And "What did he say?"
Things I guess I thought she had already heard.  After all, I have shared the details many times through the years with people who needed to know there is Hope on the other side of a Story.  But I've never really told it directly to the person to whom the story belongs.
Because, when the unexpected happens, we humans sometimes behave badly.  And I never wanted to color her view of the people she loves with gray and black.  But gray and black come in the same box with all those vibrant happy colors, and it's not fair to throw out the whole box of crayons.
So I told her how her Dad had been shocked but supportive, even from the beginning.  How only hours after he found out, we walked down to the park where I sat down in a swing and he asked me in a tender and worried voice, "Should you be swinging?  Can you still swing?".
And how he spent hours coloring in boxes on a sheet of graph paper until he had fashioned a sign to go over the crib that said "Yancey loves Fonda and Baby."
And how we had decided to stay together...not because of this...but including it.
And like the soup soothed my sore throat, sharing these happy little things with her soothed that spot in my heart that I keep thinking is healed, but sometimes surprises me with a familiar soreness.  Not unlike the physical scar across my belly through which Hillary entered the world.  It's totally healed, but occasionally gives me a tiny unexpected painful pull when I move a certain way.  A reminder that I wouldn't have all this yellow and purple and orange without my gray and black.
So I sit here with my soup and my story and I am soothed...body and soul.