POSTPARTUM · REAL STORIES

My mother-in-law moved in for 40 days and would not let me leave the house. I was furious. Then I saw the group photo.

Why every culture on earth used to keep new mothers indoors — and what happened when I finally understood it

Last updated July 2026  |  7 min read

I need to start by saying I did not want her there.

I was eleven days postpartum, I had not slept, my nipples were destroyed, and my husband’s mother arrived from Seoul with two suitcases — one of which, I found out later, was mostly food.

She took over my kitchen within about four hours.

For the next five and a half weeks I was not allowed to do very much. No cold drinks. No going outside in the wind. No washing my hair for the first week, which I broke immediately because I am not an animal. And every single day, three times a day, she put a bowl in front of me.

Seaweed soup. Beef and radish soup. Pork liver, which I gagged on the first time and then, embarrassingly, started to crave. Bone broth with dates in it. Something dark and iron-tasting she would not fully explain except to say it was for the blood.

I called my sister and complained about it constantly. I said I felt like I was being held hostage by soup.

She flew home when my daughter was seven weeks old. I remember feeling genuinely relieved.

The photo

Fast forward. My daughter is eight months old, and my antenatal group does a reunion at someone’s house. Eleven of us, all had babies within about five weeks of each other.

Someone takes a group photo.

I looked at that photo for a long time that night.

Not in a smug way — I want to be really clear about that, because six of those women are close friends and two of them were struggling badly. But I looked at it and noticed something I could not unsee.

Four of them had the same haircut I had been seeing all over my Instagram — the postpartum bob. The one you get when you are tired of finding your own hair everywhere. Two had the little halo of broken-off baby hairs around the hairline. One had told me a fortnight earlier that she had started parting her hair on the other side to cover a thin patch.

And I had not lost basically any hair.

I had not done anything. I had not bought a single serum. I assumed I had got lucky.

Then I stopped being lucky

By month ten it started. Not dramatically at first — a few more strands in the brush. Then the shower drain. Then that specific horrible feeling of running your hands through your hair and coming away with some of it.

I remember standing in the bathroom thinking: why now? My hormones had settled months ago. My daughter had been sleeping through since seven months. It made no sense.

And I was tired. Not new-mum tired. A different kind — the kind where you sit down at 3pm and your body just switches off. Where you read the same message four times. Where your husband says are you okay and you snap at him because you do not have a real answer.

I put the two things in separate boxes in my head. Hair problem. Tired problem. It genuinely did not occur to me they were the same thing.

What she had actually been doing

I called my mother-in-law about something else entirely — my daughter’s eczema — and somewhere in that conversation I mentioned the hair.

She was not surprised at all. She asked what I had been eating.

Toast. Coffee. Whatever was left on my daughter’s plate. Coffee. More coffee.

And she said the thing that reorganised my entire understanding of the last year:

I want to explain what I found out afterwards, because I had assumed this was folk wisdom and it is not.

What she had been doing has a name — zuo yuezi, sitting the month. It is 28 to 40 days of confinement, rest and specific foods. Korea has its own version, sanhujori — the seaweed soup tradition is documented in royal court records going back to 918 AD. In Latin America it is la cuarentena — literally the quarantine. Forty days. India has jaapa. Forty days.

Four continents. A thousand years apart. No contact between them.

And every single one of them arrived at the same number.

Chinese medicine even has a name for the whole practice — bu xue, which translates as to replenish the blood.

They had no blood tests. No idea what a nutrient was. But across centuries of watching mothers recover — and watching mothers who did not — they worked out that birth costs a woman her blood, and if you do not deliberately put it back, she does not fully come back either.

Then somewhere along the line the West kept the epidural and threw away the forty days. I was discharged from hospital in under 48 hours with a leaflet and a car seat.

The bit where I tried to fix it myself

So obviously my first move was: fine, I will just eat the food.

I bought liver. I made the soup twice. I did genuinely well for about nine days.

And then real life happened — she got a cold, I went back to work three days a week, and I was standing in the kitchen at 8:40pm eating a fish finger off her plate. Nobody in my actual life is going to cook me organ meat three times a day for three months. My mother-in-law is 5,500 miles away. That is the entire reason the tradition existed: it required another woman in the house.

I do not have another woman in the house. Almost none of us do anymore.

I also found out — and this genuinely annoyed me — that even when I had eaten well, I had been sabotaging it. Two things I was doing every single day:

My prenatal had calcium in it. Calcium blocks iron absorption. My good-mum vitamin was fighting its own iron content, twice a day.

And the coffee. I was drinking four or five cups to get through the exhaustion. Coffee blocks iron absorption too. So I was drinking the exact thing that prevented the fix for the tiredness I was drinking it to survive.

What was actually in the liver

Here is the part I found most interesting, and it is why I ended up buying something instead of just cooking more.

Every one of those cultures independently landed on liver. Not chicken breast. Not spinach. Liver.

Turns out there is a reason. Liver is the only food that carries all four blood-rebuilding factors at once:

• Iron — the raw material
• B12 — builds the red blood cells
• Folate — builds the red blood cells
• Copper — the one nobody talks about: copper is what releases stored iron so your body can actually use it

They did not know why it worked. They just knew it did.

So when I found Reborne, what sold me was not the marketing. It was that the formula is exactly those four things. It is not an alternative to what my mother-in-law was doing. It is the same four factors, in drops, in a form that actually absorbs — a chelated iron that does not wreck your stomach the way the standard stuff does.

Reborne is what was in the liver. Without the liver.

I did not expect it to work

I want to be honest: I had already spent about ninety pounds on things that did nothing. A biotin gummy. A collagen powder that made my coffee taste like feet. Two different rosemary oils.

I nearly did not order it.

What changed my mind was one line on their site: your standard blood test measures haemoglobin, not ferritin. Ferritin is stored iron — it is the number your hair actually runs on. You can have completely normal bloodwork and be empty. Nobody had ever tested mine.

I ordered the three-month protocol because they were blunt about the fact that one bottle would not do anything — stores rebuild over months, not weeks. I appreciated that more than I expected to.

What actually happened

Weeks 1–3: honestly, nothing with my hair.

But around day sixteen I noticed I had not done the 3pm thing. I was still upright at 4. Then at 6. My husband commented on it before I did — he said I seemed back, which I did not love as a phrase but knew exactly what he meant.

Weeks 4–7: the shedding slowed. Not stopped — slowed. Enough that I stopped bracing before I washed it.

Weeks 8–12: the drain stopped being a horror show. And I got the little halo of regrowth at my hairline that everyone warns you looks ridiculous. It does look ridiculous. I was thrilled about it.

Somewhere in there I also started wanting things again. Making plans. Suggesting we go somewhere. I had not realised that had switched off until it came back on.

What I would tell you

If you are still shedding past month four and everyone has told you it is hormones — it probably is not hormones anymore.

Ask for a ferritin test, not just a standard blood count. Ask specifically. And know that normal starts as low as 15 on most lab ranges, while symptoms start under 30 and recovery generally needs 50 and up. Mine came back at 21 and my GP called it normal.

And if you cannot get someone to move in and cook you liver soup for forty days — and let us be honest, you cannot — then take the four things that were in it.

Every culture on earth used to give new mothers forty days to rebuild their blood. You got a leaflet and a car seat. This is the closest thing to getting those days back.

These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. Always speak to your healthcare provider about supplementation, particularly while pregnant or breastfeeding.