I’m Allison. I’m a mother, human, writer, maker, adventurer. While I am a therapist, I am all of these other complicated and beautiful things first. I started this website and my Instagram account @weavingmotherhood (formerly @allisonprinelmft) following the model of other therapists, wanting to share knowledge and tips from an expert perspective. I quickly found, however, that this style isn’t truly who I am. It felt like work, the grueling kind, and doesn’t really reflect my passion for supporting mothers in an authentic way. I kept feeling called to show up with more depth in the way that I have craved connection on this motherhood journey.
Through my work with mothers I often treat anxiety and depression from preconception, to pregnancy, to early motherhood and beyond. What I found was that, while I do offer tools to manage symptoms, the real work lies in exploring and rewriting the narratives that we hold around our identities as they intersect with motherhood. Healing through storytelling, challenging old school notions of motherhood and parenting, and writing a new narrative of empowerment, authenticity, and connection. I have seen the deepest changes come about from being fully present, connected, and leaning hard into the complex depths of the human experience. I want for this space to reflect this deeper life’s work of sharing with others in the rich narrative of our humanity. My world is overwhelmingly dominated by a little girl named Eleanor and the journey we have been on to grow our little family for the past several years. These experiences are now, and forever, inextricably intertwined with my identity as a mother.
Rather than trying to dampen the intensity of the extreme joys and the deep sorrows on this journey, I’m working hard to lean into it all. Every day people ask me to share some secret recipe for escaping suffering and pain in life, as if there is this ideal blissful existence we can and should all be working towards. We want quick fixes these days, yet the more things speed up around us the more we are called to slow down. This fast pace is often incompatible with the magical world of the child and the growth work required to come into our own as parents. These expectations of our modern life can severely damage our sense of self and inhibit the development of a renewed and meaningful identity as we are born as parents.
We need less of the little perfect squares that paint an unrealistic ideal of parenthood, and more leaning into the hardest, and quite possibly most rewarding facets of this journey. In the depth of these raw and vulnerable moments there are invaluable opportunities for healing and growth, but we can’t be expected to go at it alone. Here’s to fostering community, carving out sacred spaces, and allowing others to witness us as we transform into a version of ourselves we never knew was waiting on the other side. I’ll be sharing some old posts and writing, new stories and writing from parents, more about my own journey as a mother, and creating opportunities to connect with each other through social media and with a birth storytelling group to start. Stay tuned as I share more under the umbrella of my new project, Weaving Motherhood. I hope you’ll join me in this work of showing up authentically, expanding our collective narrative, holding space for each other, and healing both for ourselves and for generations to come.