Allison Carr Mutha Magazine <2025>

By Allison Carr

“No, baby,” I said. “Not sad. Just… Tuesday.” allison carr mutha magazine

I looked at the blurry Tuesday photo one more time. She was right. It wasn’t sad. It was just the truest thing I’ve ever taken. A smudge on the lens. A whole world inside it. By Allison Carr “No, baby,” I said

I watched her over the rim of my coffee mug. She swiped past the curated shots—the ones where the light is golden, her hair is brushed, and she is smiling not because she is happy, but because I was making barnyard animal sounds behind the lens. She paused on a blurry one. I had taken it at 6:00 AM on a Tuesday. She is in her diaper, yogurt in her hair, screaming because the blue cup was, tragically, the wrong blue cup. In the frame, my own hand is visible, reaching in to wipe her face, a smudge of my thumbprint on the lens. She was right

This is what I want to tell the woman who is reading this in the bathtub while her partner wrangles the toddler, or the one hiding in the Target parking lot for ten extra minutes just to hear herself think. You are not failing because your kitchen is a disaster zone. You are not a bad mother because you did not make the sensory bin from Pinterest. You are not broken because you sometimes miss the silence.