Emotions, really, are just fractions. You reduce them as much as you can, get to the essence of them, and sometimes you get lucky and they’re whole numbers in the end, or even prime numbers—which means they’re one thing now and so much easier to make sense of. Five, for example. Five is a natural number greater than one that cannot be formed by multiplying two smaller natural numbers and is therefore prime. Singular. I’m a five about that situation with the lines on the stick and all that came after. Five is just simply mad. I don’t want to be defined by my adoptedness—it’s just a part of me, not all of me. A fraction. But, for some reason, even the people closest to me have determined that being adopted bothers me. It doesn’t. Them thinking it bothers me is what bothers me.

I’m still mad about all that. I’m still a five.

Now that I’m in the kitchen, though, the mad turns to something else because I’m remembering better: the last time Mom made soup was a few weeks ago—Italian wedding. I forgot because she ended up giving it all to her friend who was sick. She never would say why she made it. That soup was the only one in our entire lives that she insisted on making alone. She wouldn’t let any of us in the kitchen, and she played Joni Mitchell’s “A Case of You” on repeat. I’ll never know what was hurting her or why she made Dad’s favorite soup without giving him a bite.

Dad calls Mom’s soup habit soup meditation. No matter how stressed Mom is about whatever is making her pull out the soup pot in the first place, by the end she’s calm. Relaxed, even. Able to see the problem clearly and know what to do about it. Nah calls it Mom’s cauldron, like the soup pot is for divination and spells.

I say she’s just found another way to work the problem.

When you’re making soup, all you need to think about is chopping and pouring and slicing and stirring. And you can’t mess it up, not really. It’s not like baking, where you have to consider thermodynamics and its effect on various chemical compounds. Baking is science. Soup—maybe soup is art. To make it, you have to engage the right side of your brain. Your imagination. And you need to use all five senses, not just sight. You give the left side of your brain a break—the logic part of it. Wait. WAIT.

MY MOTHER IS A GENIUS.