Midwest Mimi

  • The Survivable Option

    When you are poor, calling for help is never just about help. It is about what follows. In a crisis, parenting becomes a calculation between different kinds of risk. This is the story of the day I chose what looked indefensible from the outside and necessary from the inside.

  • I Didnā€™t Refuse Help. I Didnā€™t Feel Safe Accepting It.

    When I turned down Early Intervention for my daughter, it wasnā€™t because I didnā€™t love her. It was because help didnā€™t feel neutral. It felt like exposure. For poor parents, the line between support and scrutiny is thin.

  • Still Walking

    A reflection on faith, covenant, and queerness from inside the tension. I still pray. I still believe. I still love my wife. I do not have every theological answer, but I am still walking.

  • The Life Iā€™m Writing Into Existence

    I donā€™t have the money to build the life I want yetā€¦ so Iā€™m writing it first. This is the story of how Iā€™m creating a safer, slower, more intentional life for my familyā€”starting with imagination and turning it into something real.

  • Grief That Grows

    Healing did not mean letting my mother go. It meant learning how to keep loving her in a way that did not cost me my own lifeā€”and allowing grief to change shape into something quieter, steadier, and still full of love.

  • Grief That Grows

    After my mother died, my family did not grieve in the same way. My dad withdrew, my brother went quiet, and I had to learn that different expressions of grief do not mean abandonmentā€”but they do change how we love each other.

  • Grief That Grows

    After eight years of anticipatory grief and the loss of my mother to early onset Alzheimerā€™s, I learned that grief doesnā€™t just take who you loveā€”it takes the shape of the world you built around them.

  • No Neat Justice

    When powerful men are accused, the internet debates. The women who survived are not debating. Their bodies are remembering. I do not control federal prosecutions. But I control my boundaries. Hope does not live in headlines. It lives in what we enforce in our own lives.

  • Parenting Again in Midlife: For the Mothers Who Thought Theyā€™d Be Done by Now

    What happens when the season you thought was coming never arrives? This essay is for women who find themselves parenting again in midlife, in bodies that have already lived. A reflection on layered motherhood, chronic illness, neurodivergence, and loving deeply while grieving what has changed.

  • Refusing Erasure: When Silence Protects Harm

    When headlines about abuse surface, my first reaction isnā€™t political. Itā€™s physical. My body remembers before my mind can catch up. This is about silence ā€” and what happens when harm is named but comfort is protected instead of truth.

  • Kids Do Well When They Can: Understanding Overwhelm Instead of Calling It Defiance

    My daughter had reached her limit long before I realized it. In the truck after a long day, her tone sharpened, her words came out rude, and I felt that familiar mix of frustration and helplessness. In the moment, it looked like bad behavior. What I could not see yet was that she wasnā€™t being…

  • Parenting Through Presence, Not Perfection: What My Kids Taught Me About Co-Regulation

    There were mornings I could feel myself going offline. Not dramatic. Just done. My patience thin, my nerves shot, my thoughts moving faster than I could hold them. Sometimes I would sit on the bathroom floor just to breathe and let the moment pass. And quietly, my kids would follow. They wouldnā€™t ask for anything.…

  • She Didnā€™t Sleep Through the Night for the First Three Years

    My daughter didnā€™t sleep through the night for the first three years of her life. Not once. She needed presence, pressure, and movement to settle. There was no diagnosis yet, no language for what we were navigating, only the quiet knowing that her body did not rest the way other babiesā€™ bodies seemed to. I…

  • The Rules Trauma Wrote

    Sexual assault does not only leave memories. It installs rules ā€” rules about safety, blame, and ownership of your own body. Those rules are written under duress by a nervous system trying to survive, and they can outlive the danger that created them. In this essay, I explore how trauma embeds itself quietly in the…

  • You Cannot Lose What Was Taken: Purity Culture, Abuse, and the Silence That Followed

    Purity culture taught many survivors that something taken from them by force made them ā€œdamaged.ā€ This essay reframes purity, consent, and shame, and explains why silence protects harm, not holiness.