“Why haven’t you made the soup I told you to make? You won’t heal properly from giving birth and you won’t make enough milk for baby to eat unless you have this soup! This is why you are so tired; if you have this soup, you won’t be tired anymore!”

My mom is referring to the traditional Chinese medicine soup known as ji jiu tang, literally translated as “chicken wine soup,” which is a well known postpartum Chinese soup that Chinese mothers drink regularly after giving birth to help their bodies recuperate, which also supposedly helps with milk production. There is obviously no science or data to back up any of these claims, but hey, what postpartum mom is going to reject having a tasty, nourishing chicken-based soup?

My aunt was so kind and sweet that she actually priority-mail sent me all the ingredients (minus the chicken and ginger, obviously) to make the soup. She told me over text how to make it with very very detailed instructions (e.g. “a little of this,” “a handful of that,” “not too much of this but just enough”). I just hadn’t gotten around to making it just yet.

I insisted to my mom that I was tired and sleep deprived, that I’m eating plenty of other healthy things (oatmeal every morning with flaxseed, greens, etc.), that I will get around to making the soup soon when I could. She then asked that if I can’t make the soup, why can’t Chris make the soup? Yeah, like THAT is going happen.

“Well, what else is Chris doing? He’s not doing anything to help,” she said out of nowhere.

I really got pissed at this comment; she has absolutely NO idea how helpful Chris has been since the baby was born. I told her he was doing literally everything else around the house other than breastfeeding, and she retorted back, “Yeah? Like what? What IS he doing?”

To even respond to that would, as usual, be useless, so I just told her she had no idea what she was talking about and told her I was tired and needed to go, and hung up. That’s the nice thing about having distance; you can just hang up and not deal with an overbearing, unrealistic mom who thinks that some random Chinese soup is going to be a replacement for actual SLEEP.