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.
Her phone buzzed: a text from the school nurse. “Mila has a headache. Please pick up.”
Allison grew up in a house where her own mother, Diane, was a martyr of the highest order. Diane made her own yogurt. Diane ironed her husband’s boxer shorts. Diane volunteered for every bake sale, every field trip, every church potluck, and then collapsed into a glass of white wine every night at 8:47 PM, her eyes blank as two dimes. mutha magazine article allison
The Unbecoming: Allison on Shedding the Good Mother Myth
“I thought I was anxious because I was a bad mother,” she says. “No. I was anxious because I was a mother in a system designed to isolate and exhaust me. I was anxious because I had no village, no margin, no off switch.” Allison stood in front of the bulk granola
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.
Who will do it?
Her legs went soft. She didn’t faint. She simply sat down on the linoleum floor, right between the flaxseed and the chia. She pulled her knees to her chest. And she wept—not the elegant, tear-streaked cry of a movie mother, but the guttural, snotty, animal sound of a creature who has been running for so long that the idea of stopping feels like dying.