Mutha — Magazine _best_

I tried to go on strike once. A quiet one. I stopped reminding. I stopped refilling the soap dispenser. I stopped mentally tracking the expiration date on the car seat. For three days, we lived in chaos. The four-year-old wore two different rain boots. The baby ate a cracker off the floor of the bus. My husband looked at me with genuine confusion: “Why didn’t you say something?”

Meanwhile, your husband is hailed as a hero for taking a toddler to the park for 45 minutes. (And he is a hero. But so are you. Why are you the baseline and he’s the miracle?) mutha magazine

And then I’m going to sit in the uncomfortable, glorious silence of not knowing. Because the goal of motherhood shouldn’t be to run the machine perfectly. It should be to burn the manual and teach everyone else how to build a new one. I tried to go on strike once

The only way out isn’t a chore chart. Chore charts are just another thing for us to manage. The only way out is to stop being the server. To let the Wi-Fi crash. To let someone else reboot the router. I stopped refilling the soap dispenser

While brushing my teeth, I was mentally processing: Preschool snack sign-up (tomorrow), pediatrician appointment reschedule (the rash is back), dog’s flea meds (three days late), my mother’s birthday (next week, no card), and the exact location of the spare lightning cable (behind the couch, left cushion).