__full__ - Mutha Magazine Article Allison

Because the truth—the one we don’t say out loud, the one Mutha was founded to speak—is that you cannot pour from an empty vessel. And you are not a vessel. You are a woman. You are a mother. And you are allowed to stop performing long enough to remember which one you were first.

Allison stood in front of the bulk granola. She had not slept more than four consecutive hours in eleven years. She hadn’t had a bowel movement without someone knocking on the door in seven. She hadn’t finished a thought—a real, unbroken, private thought—since 2013. mutha magazine article allison

Mutha has published hundreds of these confessions over the years—the inventory of the unseen. But Allison’s list went viral in her own small way, passed among the moms at her co-op preschool, then on a private Facebook group called The Exhausted Middle , then to a therapist who photocopied it for her clients. Because every woman read it and thought: Oh. That’s my list, too. Because the truth—the one we don’t say out

She wrote a piece for her local parenting newsletter—just a raw, unedited list of ten things she would no longer do. Number four was: “I will no longer pretend that ‘we’ decided something when ‘we’ means I decided and you nodded.” Number seven was: “I will no longer apologize for my body taking up space in my own home.” You are a mother

Then another: “Can you bring hummus for 20 kids to the 4th-grade harvest party?”

The unraveling was not linear. It looked like:

For ten years, Allison was the room parent, the carpool captain, the keeper of the emotional calendar. Then, one Tuesday afternoon in the cereal aisle, her body refused to perform anymore. This is the story of a woman who stopped mothering from the neck down and finally started living from the inside out.