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(via Thrive) -- We’re all about bringing you real and honest content. In this episode, we talked with Alexis Barad-Cutler, writer and founder of Not Safe For Mom Group (NSFMG), an online community where members talk candidly about the grittier side of the motherhood experience. She’s known for putting it all out there, bringing to light topics that aren’t always easy to discuss, and our conversation reflected this. We loved having an honest and open discussion about all the things, and know you will enjoy hearing from the Queen of Realness herself.

(NBC News) -- “Six months of isolation has certainly impacted Alexis Barad-Cutler’s drinking. The writer and founder of the motherhood community Not Safe For Mom Group and mom of two living in Brooklyn, New York, tells me she has been drinking one or two martinis a night, every night, since the pandemic hit. “The drinking is now an expected part of my routine, and it has to happen every night. My body has come to expect it,” she said.

Barad-Cutler says she spoke with her psychologist soon after shelter-in-place orders shut down much of New York City, and upped her mental health medications “as high as they can go” to help her deal with the highs and lows. “At first the medication helped,” she explains. “But after a while, the anxiety and impending sense of doom crept back, and at the end of every day alcohol felt like a salve.”

https://www.thetot.com/mama/yes-motherhood-can-be-lonely-heres-how-to-cope/

Online support groups

While helpful, in-person support groups aren’t for everyone. Moms with hectic schedules, introverted moms, or those living in remote areas may benefit from finding support online.

Mother and writer, Alexis Barad-Cutler has created “NSFMG (not safe for mom group),”an online space and real-time community where moms can discuss the very vulnerable and nitty-gritty challenges of motherhood. Meant to provide moms a safe, filter-free space, NSFMG invites women to discuss their sex lives, the emotional load of motherhood, postpartum depression, and more.

(Bloomberg) -- “The pandemic amplified an already untenable situation, where women are burning the candle at both ends as they drown in work and hack together child care,” says Alexis Barad-Cutler, who runs an online women’s community called Not Safe For Mom Group and has two sons, age 6 and 8.

“Working moms are already earning less to the dollar than our male counterparts and now, because we’re not the higher wage earners, our careers are put to the side again,” says Barad-Cutler, who took charge of home schooling because her husband, an attorney in New York, is the primary breadwinner. She now takes care of her kids during the day and works from 9 p.m. to 1 a.m. most nights.

A group, unlike the usual mom meetups, nsfmg offers support and a stigma-free digital space with a community of mothers from all over the world. This is a safe space where you can express anything on motherhood. Founder Alexis Barad-Cutler founded the group when a popular parenting website took down an essay she had written, deeming it “too controversial.” An excellent platform for mothers who wish to vent and read others stories from all walks of life as well as participate in sharing how they are feeling -like really, feeling via nsfmg popular Instagram Stories, which offers mothers to do anonymously if they choose.

Our September Salon guest, Alexis Barad-Cutler, is a social media genius. Her 8000-strong online community Not Safe For Mom Group (nsfmg) has taken a medium famous for highly-curated branding and careful self-presentation - Instagram - and turned it into a space for authentic storytelling and self-disclosure. Along the way, (nsfmg) has hosted conversations on everything from identity, to infertility, to anti-racism. If you want to learn how to leverage social media for deep audience engagement, you need to be watching Alexis’s work. And if you’re looking for a space to discuss the thornier side of motherhood, you need to join (nsfmg).

From adopting to living child-free and raising differently-abled and non-binary children, five women delve into their personal relationship with motherhood.

They say becoming a mother is the best thing that will ever happen to you.  They say that the first second you see your baby’s face you will instantly fall in love and live happily ever after in motherhood bliss.  But what happens when after 9 months of nurturing this baby in your womb, prepping a nursery, changing your life and anticipating their birth, you look at your baby and think, “My baby is trying to kill me.”  When Alexis Barad-Cutler realized she couldn’t relate to any of the warm and fuzzy feelings mom blogs talk about, she felt ashamed and alone.

On the night before Halloween, over 40 women gathered together at The Motherhood Center (TMC) to talk about the kinds of things many people avoid talking about altogether: from mental health and PMADs, to their sex lives, to their feelings about their postpartum bodies, to the deep-rooted biases they experienced in the workplace. Was this a reunion of sorts? An organized meet-up of moms who’ve shared space many times before? Not at all. These women were, almost all of them, strangers — and they opened up because, perhaps for the first time ever — they were invited to.

In the Library

Written by Alexis Barad-Cutler Depression, in some form, has dipped in and out of my adult life, like an old boyfriend who, every couple of years, sends you an email or a text that ends up derailing your entire day. Except, unlike with the old boyfriend, the feeling doesn’t go away in a night or two. It lingers around, seeping-black, to take hold and suffocate the air you breathe and erase all the joy you may have found in life before you knew him.

Written by Alexis Barad-Cutler Depression, in some form, has dipped in and out of my adult life, like an old boyfriend who, every couple of years, sends you an email or a text that ends up derailing your entire day. Except, unlike with the old boyfriend, the feeling doesn’t go away in a night or two. It lingers around, seeping-black, to take hold and suffocate the air you breathe and erase all the joy you may have found in life before you knew him.

Alexis Barad-Cutler joins Mallory in the MILK Studio. Alexis is a writer and the founder of Not Safe For Mom Group, a digital space and community for mothers to tell their stories and express unfiltered feelings without judgement.

You may have heard of NYFW but what about NSFMG? Not Safe For Mom’s Group is a stigma-free digital space and IRL community where women can express and explore raw feelings about motherhood without fear of judgement. NSFMG allows women to share “un-safe” thoughts, creating an atmosphere of empathy and support. NSFMG supports many of the same conversations that by CHLOE. fostered during our Beyond Mother’s Day campaign, where our goal was to destigmatize fertility and women’s health and create safe spaces for honest conversations.