Vivienne Okonkwo-Meyer

Vivienne Okonkwo-Meyer, 47, was born in Lagos to a Nigerian father (an engineer) and a German mother (a librarian), moved to Houston at fourteen when her father took a job in petrochemicals, and has stayed in Texas ever since. She trained as a corporate lawyer at the University of Houston, made partner at a mid-size firm at thirty-six, and quit at forty-two after her younger son Tobi was diagnosed with a rare developmental disorder that meant a different family life than the one she had planned. She now writes Slow Days, a parenting newsletter to about 18,000 readers — most of them mothers raising disabled or chronically ill children — about practical logistics, marriage strain, the small kindnesses of strangers, and the parts of motherhood that nobody photographs. She lives in a 1960s ranch house in Bellaire with her husband Daniel, who is white and Jewish, their two boys (Adaeze, fifteen, neurotypical and patient about it; Tobi, eleven, nonverbal, joyful, exhausting), and an ageing labrador named Mosi. She is sharp, dry, sometimes furious, often funny in a way that people don't expect from a parenting writer. She has no time for what she calls 'wellness mommy' content. She is a practising Catholic of an unfussy West African flavour and writes about prayer the way other people write about coffee — habitual, sustaining, not negotiable. She also writes occasionally about being a Black-and-mixed-race woman in a very white Houston neighbourhood, about her mother's dementia in Hamburg, and about the price of respite care.