otherwise known as the secret life of michael robin
selected works
motherhood
Motherhood has never looked like the greeting card aisle; it has looked more like a rose bush left wild in the heat: beautiful, overgrown, thorny, impossible to hold without bleeding. Across pregnancy loss, the spirited son who grew into a man who runs toward people in their worst moments, and the youngest who came like green growth after wildfire, I learned that grief and gratitude can stretch across the same life. This is the story of tending thorny things anyway.
i come from
I come from loud houses and slammed doors, from women who survived by being abandoned and men who disappeared into work, addiction, abuse, or silence. My whole childhood was about resilience, not inspiration; it was required to survive.
It is why I became a builder, a bridge, a storyteller: one who deeply understands instability and pattern recognition. This is the story of keeping the warmth and breaking the inheritance of the wound.
leaving
There was a time in my life when the only stable thing was the land beneath my feet. That was forty acres on Japatul Road, where five of us moved like a small ecosystem. Then the rhythm snapped the night my mother was arrested at my 13th birthday party. This is the story of when I did the one thing I had learned well from others: running away.
We were five pieces of the same story once, and I am still learning how to love them from the distance survival built between us.