Both wrote about their partners without demonizing them. Allison’s husband appears as a bewildered co-captain; Alison’s partner is a shadow in the hallway. Neither man is a villain or a hero. They are simply there , another piece of furniture in the chaotic household.
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. mutha magazine articles written by allison or alison
Unlike the aspirational parenting content on Instagram, the Al(l)isons wrote openly about money. Allison’s essays mention the anxiety of a freelance paycheck. Alison’s pieces note the cheap wine and the hand-me-down crib. Mutha was not a wealthy magazine, and its writers reflected that reality. Part IV: The Legacy of the Al(l)isons Mutha Magazine ceased regular publication in 2020, a quiet casualty of the pandemic’s economic strangulation. But the archives remain, and the work of Allison and Alison continues to circulate in writing workshops and postpartum support groups. Both wrote about their partners without demonizing them
Neither writer ever says, “But I wouldn’t trade it for the world.” That qualifier is absent. They allow the bad, the ugly, and the boring to exist without a silver lining. They are simply there , another piece of
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.
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.
Here, Allison tackles the performative nature of playground politics. She recounts “auditioning” for a playgroup of wealthy stay-at-home mothers, detailing the code-switching required to be accepted. She notes the way her voice rises an octave, the way she hides the Target logo on her diaper bag. The article is devastating because it never villainizes the other mothers. Instead, Allison concludes that “we are all just women terrified of doing it alone.” This piece cemented her role as the publication’s anthropologist—watching, noting, and reporting back from the weird, ritualistic tribe of modern parenthood.