Mutha Magazine Article Allison [ 2026 Release ]

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

And she realized: She hated that phrase. You’re doing great. It was a benediction for a religion she no longer believed in. Great at what? Great at suppressing a migraine to attend a birthday party? Great at saying “it’s fine” when it was very much not fine? Great at performing calm while her amygdala was screaming? mutha magazine article allison

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. “I had forgotten what my own boredom felt

She is writing a book now. Not a parenting guide. A memoir about the year she stopped performing. She calls it The Unbecoming. The working tagline is: “What you lose when you stop being everything to everyone is not a tragedy. It’s a beginning.” It was a benediction for a religion she

“I had become a verb,” she tells me, stirring her coffee. We’re sitting in her living room, which is messier now than in the old photos—blankets piled on the couch, a half-finished puzzle on the table. “I wasn’t a person who mothered. I was mothering. Past tense of myself.”

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.

Allison’s husband, Mark, is not a villain. He is a nice man who coaches soccer and takes out the recycling and genuinely believes he is “helping.” But when Allison stopped—when she sat on the kitchen floor one morning and said, “I am not making lunches today”—Mark’s first reaction was confusion. Then frustration. Then a quiet, devastating: “But who will do it?”