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.
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. mutha magazine article allison
“They needed a competent mother,” Allison says. “They didn’t need a dead one.” The physical recovery was slower than the emotional one
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. Then a weekly acupuncture appointment where she was
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.”
Allison remembers the exact fluorescent hum of the Stop & Shop on Route 9. It was 2:47 PM on a Tuesday. She had thirty-three minutes to get the gluten-free dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets (the ones her youngest would only eat if the eyes were perfectly spaced), almond milk, the specific brand of cheddar bunnies that didn’t have “weird coloring,” and a sympathy card for her mother-in-law’s neighbor.
