The thoughtful editors at _Literary Mama_ encouraged me to be candid in this essay about writing and parenting while chronically ill, and I hope to embolden other writers whose physical limitations make parenting that much harder.

http://www.literarymama.com/litreflections/archives/2019/11/writing-from-a-pile-of-shoes.html

When my son was seventeen, I would go downstairs in the morning and count the pairs of shoes piled by the back door to figure out how many kids had spent the night on the floor of his room. (That's where the title comes from.) I really wasn’t concerned if my house was overrun by teenagers because I was too sick. I was living the chaos narrative, and that story was true to my life. When you suffer the crisis of becoming ill, you have to get a whole set of instructions for living. But there’s this period where you have no history with the illness, no track record of recovering from flareups, and no trust that you will recover.

I began looking for fiction that featured sick mothers trying to raise kids, and I couldn’t find much, and I wondered who would want to read it besides me, but decided I didn’t care and wrote a story that was eventually selected by Jane Smiley for the Goldenberg Prize. Its reception showed me that there was a place for this subject in the world. Later, I began to question my own attitudes, because really, there is no one who is untouched by illness, mental or physical.