Midwest Mimi

  • The Doctors Who Didn’t Stop Looking

    For years, doctors treated my symptoms without seeing the bigger picture. Then one neurologist asked why nobody was connecting the dots. His question changed my medical care and taught me what truly matters in a doctor: not having every answer, but caring enough to keep looking.

  • 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…

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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…

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • I Still Want More

    I am happy with my life, but that does not mean I have stopped wanting more. I still want better health, more money, a home of our own, more freedom, and a bigger writing career. Contentment is not the absence of ambition. Sometimes it is simply learning to enjoy the breeze while you keep building…

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.…

  • Help Has a Voicemail

    I have a list on my phone that looks like it should belong to someone who works for a human services agency. Except I do not. I am the mother. Before disabled families receive help, there is another job no one talks about: finding the help. It is a full-time, unpaid, invisible job filled with…

  • 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…

  • I Am Not Less Autistic Because I Learned How to Live

    I am not less autistic because I have learned how to manage myself. I am not less autistic because I can stay calm in a crisis, build recovery days into my life, or recognize my limits before I break down. I have just been paying attention.

  • 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.