Mutha Magazine Article Allison -

A store employee in a blue vest crouched next to her. “Ma’am? Do you need me to call an ambulance?”

What Mutha understands—what Allison learned the hard way—is that motherhood is not primarily an emotional experience. It is a physical one. The body keeps the score.

“I had forgotten what my own boredom felt like,” she says. “It was luxurious.” mutha magazine article allison

But if you take one thing from her, take this: The next time you feel your body go soft in the fluorescent light, do not apologize. Sit down. Let the tears come. Let the groceries wait.

The physical recovery was slower than the emotional one. She started small: five minutes of lying on the floor with her hands on her belly, breathing. Then ten. Then a weekly acupuncture appointment where she was not allowed to check her phone. Then, radically, a weekend away—not a “girls’ trip” full of scheduling and logistics, but a cheap motel room fifty miles away where she ate stale saltines in bed and watched a reality show about cake decorating. A store employee in a blue vest crouched next to her

“I want to be a person who is also a mother,” she says finally. “Not a mother who is occasionally a person.”

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. It is a physical one

The backlash was immediate. Two other mothers called her “selfish.” Her mother-in-law left a voicemail saying she was “worried about the children.” A man she didn’t know commented on the newsletter: “Imagine if fathers abandoned their responsibilities like this.”