By Something happened this week that I need to tell you about, and I need to tell it carefully because the telling matters as much as the happening.
I was in the kitchen on Wednesday afternoon, making tea, when the phone rang. It was Kayla. Not the seven a.m. call. Not the after-work call. The wrong-time call. The one that makes your heart skip because the timing is wrong and wrong timing means something is happening that wasn't supposed to happen.
"Granny," she said, and her voice was steady, which scared me more than if she'd been crying, because Kayla's steady voice is the nurse voice, the voice she uses when things are serious and she needs to communicate clearly. "I'm at the hospital. I had some bleeding. They're checking the baby."
The kitchen went silent. Not literally — the kettle was still hissing, the clock was still ticking — but inside me, everything stopped. Sixteen weeks. Michael Devon Brooks. Bleeding. Hospital. Checking.
"I'm coming," I said. "Granny, you don't have to—" "Kayla Marie Henderson-Brooks, I am coming to that hospital and you will not tell me otherwise. Where are you?" She told me. Room 4212. Maternal triage. The floor she works on, the floor where she is charge nurse, the floor where she is now a patient instead of a provider, and that reversal — that terrible, humbling reversal — is something I understand because I was in that same hospital when Earl was in the ICU, and being in a hospital where you're not in charge is a specific kind of helplessness that no one should feel alone.
Denise drove me. We didn't speak. The silence was full of every prayer I know and several I invented on the spot. We arrived. Devon was already there, still in his paramedic uniform, his face the color of someone who has driven to a hospital a hundred times for other people's emergencies and is now sitting in a chair for his own. I held his hand. I held Kayla's hand. I held the space between what was happening and what I needed to happen, and I prayed.
The baby is fine. The ultrasound showed a healthy, active, completely unbothered boy — kicking, turning, doing the things that babies do when they don't know the outside world is panicking. The bleeding was a subchorionic hematoma, which sounds terrible and is, according to Kayla-the-nurse (who returned to nurse mode the second the ultrasound showed a healthy baby), relatively common and usually resolves on its own. Bed rest for a week. No heavy lifting. No stress. (Kayla said "no stress" and I said, "Baby, you just stressed me into next year, and you want ME to have no stress?")
We came home. I made soup. Chicken soup with rice and vegetables and the kind of love that only comes from a kitchen that has been scared and is now cooking through the fear. The soup was for Kayla and Devon and for baby Michael, who doesn't eat soup yet but who was, in some molecular way, nourished by the love that went into it. The food heals what the fear breaks. It always has.
Now go on and feed somebody.
The soup I made that Wednesday night wasn’t fussy — it was chicken, rice, vegetables, and everything I had left after a day that nearly took me to my knees. Chicken is what I reach for when the world gets frightening, because there’s something in the slow simmer of it that feels like an exhale. If you’ve got someone at home who needs feeding — someone coming off a hard week, a hard day, a hard hour — I want you to have every chicken recipe I trust, and there are twenty of them below.
20 Chicken Salad Recipes
Prep Time: 15 min | Cook Time: 20 min | Total Time: 35 min | Servings: 4
Ingredients
- 3 cups cooked chicken breast, shredded or chopped
- 1/2 cup mayonnaise
- 2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
- 2 stalks celery, finely diced
- 1/4 cup red onion, finely diced
- 1/2 cup red grapes, halved (or dried cranberries)
- 1/4 cup chopped pecans or walnuts, toasted
- 1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
- 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
- Salt and black pepper to taste
- Fresh parsley, chopped, for garnish
Instructions
- Cook the chicken. Poach or roast chicken breasts until cooked through. Let cool completely, then shred or chop into bite-sized pieces.
- Make the dressing. In a large bowl, whisk together mayonnaise, Dijon mustard, lemon juice, garlic powder, salt, and pepper until smooth and combined.
- Combine. Add the chicken, celery, red onion, grapes, and pecans to the bowl. Stir gently until everything is evenly coated in the dressing.
- Taste and adjust. Taste for seasoning and add more salt, pepper, or lemon juice as needed. This is the step where you make it yours.
- Chill. Cover and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes before serving to let the flavors come together.
- Serve. Serve on croissants, toasted sourdough, lettuce cups, or straight from the bowl with a good fork. Garnish with fresh parsley.
Nutrition (per serving)
Calories: 340 | Protein: 28g | Fat: 21g | Carbs: 9g | Fiber: 1g | Sodium: 420mg