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I Can’t Wait Until I’m Better to Start Living
After nearly dying from respiratory failure, I knew I wanted more than simply surviving. Years later, my chronic illnesses are better managed, but I’m not cured. I’ve learned that a meaningful life doesn’t have to wait for perfect health. Sometimes living means creating art, raising my children, and finding joy in the ordinary moments my…
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Technology Did Not Cure My Chronic Illness. It Gave Me a Life Beyond Surviving It.
After an unexpected fall sent me back to bed, I still wrote, connected, and applied for a grant from my phone. Technology has not cured my chronic illness, but it has given me a life beyond surviving it.
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11 Ways to Disguise School as Real Life
Kids do not all need the same path into learning. From cooking and gardening to movies, board games, special interests, and even boredom, real life is full of ways to help children learn without making everything feel like school.
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This Wasn’t the Life I Planned. Midwest Mimi Is What I Made From It.
I thought Midwest Mimi would be a blog about chronic illness, homeschooling, and nature. After 132 posts, I realized it had become something larger: a place to make meaning, find language for difficult experiences, and help readers feel seen.
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Taking God Too Seriously to Enjoy What He Made
Legalistic religion can make us so busy watching everyone else that we miss the life right in front of us. Faith, for me, is about relationship, grace, and learning to notice God in the ordinary moments.
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I Don’t Think Everything Happens for a Reason
People often say everything happens for a reason, but I do not believe every wound was chosen by God. I believe we live in a broken world, and that God can still meet us in the aftermath, restore what was lost, and help something good grow from what never should have happened.
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Being Easy to Entertain Might Be My Greatest Life Skill
Curiosity has helped keep my world big even when chronic illness has made my life physically smaller. Books, art, research, writing, family, and even something as simple as watching my son blow the seeds from a dandelion remind me there is always more to notice, learn, and wonder about.
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A Small Life Is Not the Same Thing as a Meaningless One
A life can become smaller in radius without becoming smaller in meaning. Disability, limited stamina, and money have changed the life I once imagined, but they have not taken away the people, stories, faith, beauty, and ordinary moments that make it full.
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They Call Me Strong Because They Do Not Want to Call Me Unpaid Labor
People call mothers like me strong, but sometimes strong is simply the word used when no one wants to say unsupported, overworked, or unpaid. Family caregiving is love, but it is also labor. When systems depend on mothers to coordinate therapies, equipment, accommodations, transportation, and safety, praising our strength does not make the work disappear.…
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I Have Lived, and I Still Love My Life
Some evenings, peace feels like a summer breeze on the porch. My life has not been easy, and I would not choose every hard thing again. But my life is not only the record of what hurt me. It is family, survival, softness, love, and the ordinary wealth of a home I still want to…
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She Learned to Work Before the World Called It Work
Rae learned to work before the world called it work. At twelve, she cleaned my brother’s shop office for real money, real expectations, and a little freedom of her own. I am proud of the confidence work gave her. I also grieve that money had to matter so young.
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What the Calendar Couldn’t Hold
June was full of appointments, reschedules, travel, surgery recovery, and work. I needed the calendar, the reminders, and the map. But the best parts of the month happened in the margins: porch conversations, toddler hugs, family dinners, chalk on the sidewalk, and ordinary beauty I almost missed.
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I Am the Calendar, the Case Manager, and the Backup Plan
Caregiving is not just loving people. It is logistics, memory, paperwork, appointments, refills, therapies, bills, and backup plans. I am grateful I can carry the map for my family, but I am also tired from doing it inside a body that needs care too.
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