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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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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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We Called Our Children and Told Them Not to Come Home
When gunshots rang out near our home, we called our children and told them not to come home. Raising a family in a neighborhood affected by violence means making difficult choices, living with fear, and working toward a future where home can truly feel safe.
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The Skateboard Is the Way In
Two baskets of library books showed me what changes when learning begins with a child’s real interests. For Channing, the skateboard became the way in.
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What Progress Actually Sounds Like
My children did not lack the ability to learn. They lacked schools prepared to support them. This is what happened and what progress sounded like after we left.
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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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What If We’re Measuring Intelligence by the Wrong Things?
A mystery novel made me think differently about the way we measure intelligence. In my own family, communication looks radically different from person to person, and I’ve learned that speech, reading, and quick answers are only part of the story.
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The Worn Path
A forgotten audiobook sent me down a rabbit hole about memory, learning, and the physical paths our brains build through repetition. It made me think about old relationships, survival habits, creativity, and the strange truth that the life we practice becomes easier to keep living.
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Some Lessons Are Too Expensive to Learn the Hard Way
Some lessons are worth learning by trial and error. Others carry consequences too serious to discover after the fact. From marriage and parenting to the race to build more powerful AI, I keep coming back to the same question: when do we know enough to put the guardrails up?
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What My Kids Learned From Watching Me Be Sick
My kids have learned from watching me be sick that bodies have limits, asking for help is not failure, and families sometimes have to carry different corners of the load. My illness has cost them things, but it has also taught them that children do not need an invincible mother. They need one who loves…
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Sometimes You Have to Miss Someone Without Chasing Them
Sometimes missing someone does not mean you are supposed to go back. This is about the people we still love, the versions of them we remember, and learning that history does not always get the final vote.
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When My Body Cancels the Plans
A flare day is more than just feeling worse. It is when the systems I already use to manage chronic illness stop being enough. This is what that looks like inside a real family, and what I wish more people understood about loving someone whose body does not always cooperate.
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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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The Blank Page Problem
Sometimes creative block does not mean we have run out of ideas. Sometimes we just need a frame, a scene, a shape, or something already on the page to give us somewhere to begin.
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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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