Midwest Mimi

  • 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.

  • 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?

  • 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…

  • 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.

  • He Picked His People

    A joke on my porch about being the common denominator in two divorces turns into a harder question about love, loyalty, work, and what happens when the ways we care for people also cost the people closest to us.

  • The Women We Become

    Becoming Rae’s mother did not mean I stopped being my mother’s daughter. Sixteen years later, as I watch my daughter become a young woman, I understand more about what my mother gave me, what I passed on, and the women we keep becoming.

  • 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…

  • Survival Is Not the Same as Safety: What We Forget When We Praise Strong Children

    When we praise children for being strong, we do not always ask what made them need that strength so young. Reading Demon Copperhead made me think about my daughter Rae, about the burned pot of macaroni and cheese she tried to make for her brother, and about the difference between a child being resilient and…

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Good and Evil in the Same Skin

    More than a decade later, this is still one of the deepest losses of friendship I have ever experienced. Not romantic. Not simple. More like losing a partner, a brother, and a whole former life at once. This is not a story about one bad man and one good woman. It is a story about…

  • 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.