Mutha Magazine Articles Written By Allison Or Alison |best| Instant

This piece is a meditation on the hours following her daughter’s bedtime. While most parenting content celebrates “me time,” Alison explores the eerie silence as a symptom of dissociation. She writes: “Now that the noise has stopped, I can hear the ringing in my ears. That ringing has a name, and its name is before .” She alludes to a traumatic birth without explicitly describing it, using the child’s absence (asleep) to revisit the trauma of the child’s arrival. It is a masterclass in implication, trusting the reader to fill in the gaps.

This piece remains a touchstone for Mutha readers. Allison describes a single morning: burning a grilled cheese, a toddler refusing shoes, a missed deadline. But she maps the emotional fallout using architectural metaphors. “Anger in a two-bedroom apartment,” she writes, “is not an emotion. It is a load-bearing wall.” The essay dissects how small spaces amplify parental fury. Unlike many parenting writers who apologize for their rage, Allison sits in it. She analyzes the shame of screaming at a four-year-old not as a moral failing, but as a predictable outcome of late capitalism and poor urban planning. The comment section exploded—not with judgment, but with relief. mutha magazine articles written by allison or alison

In just 800 words, Alison dismantles the “breast is best” crusade. She describes the physical sensation of her milk not letting down: “a dry riverbed trying to remember water.” The essay is not about formula vs. breastfeeding; it is about grief for a biological process that refused to cooperate. She writes about pumping in a closet at work, the machine a “mechanical bull that wouldn’t buck.” This article was shared over 50,000 times on Facebook, largely because Alison refused to frame her story as a triumph. She did not “overcome” her low supply. She simply survived it, and that survival, she argues, is the only victory. This piece is a meditation on the hours

Together, they form a diptych: one written in ink, one in breath. Both are essential. Both are muthas. To read their original work, visit the Mutha Magazine archives via the Wayback Machine. Search for “Allison” and “Alison” — and bring a cup of coffee, a box of tissues, and zero judgment. That ringing has a name, and its name is before

Allison’s prose is dense, image-rich, and slightly academic. She uses semicolons like scalpels. Her essays rarely offer a tidy resolution. Instead, they end with a question, leaving the reader in the same uncomfortable, unresolved space where most parenting actually occurs. Part II: Alison (The Poet of Postpartum Grief) If Allison is the ethnographer, Alison (often Alison Stine or Alison Kinney, though Mutha used first names only for intimacy) is the elegist. Her contributions are shorter, more breathless, and lean heavily on white space and fragmentation. Alison writes about the body—specifically, the body that fails to meet the expectations of motherhood.