Meanwhile by Amy Patterson: Essays from a Full Life

03/21/2026

I know nothing about basketball and I’m currently leading our work bracket

Which tells you everything you need to know

🔗

🏀On March Madness, work brackets, and the things that quietly make teams work. What started as a simple work bracket has, predictably, turned into something a little bigger. Not in a dramatic way. No big kickoff, no plan behind it. Just a link dropped in Slack, a handful of reactions,

03/15/2026

If you’ve been wondering why it’s been quiet here lately, there’s a reason.

The last week has been one of the hardest experiences I’ve ever walked through. Some stories aren’t mine to tell publicly, but writing has always been how I process the moments that shake your perspective.

I shared a reflection tonight about silence, prayer, and learning to sit with the parts of life we can’t fix.

If you’re someone who talks to Jesus from time to time, I would really appreciate your prayers.

When All You Can Do Is Pray 🙏

💬On silence, perspective, and the stories that aren’t mine to tell. If you’ve been following along here for a while, you may have noticed something unusual: It’s been quiet. Normally, I publish something every few days. Sometimes thoughtful, sometimes reflective, sometimes a little ridiculo...

03/08/2026

Help pick the next Meanwhile… blog topic 👇

What should the next post be about?

Nothing is off limits. N O T H I N G!
Motherhood, work, systems, chaos, Lakeland life… anything.

Drop your ideas in the comments 💬

And if you just want to cause problems…
wrong answers are also encouraged. 😏

Who knows… one of those might actually turn into a post. 😉

03/06/2026

New on Meanwhile…

"The Year Between Fathers"

Some stories take a while to find their way onto the page.

This one is about a year that held two life-altering moments at the same time: My husband, Jimmy, becoming a father to our daughter, Haisley, and our family saying goodbye to his dad, Harley.

It’s about grief, legacy, and the strange overlap between endings and beginnings. About the ways love continues moving through a family long after someone we love is gone.

And it’s about a small but unforgettable moment: a toddler learning to walk in the hallway of an oncology floor.

If you’d like to read the full piece, you can find it here:

https://meanwhile.ghost.io/the-year-between-fathers/

🕊️

🕊️On grief, legacy, and the quiet ways love keeps walking forward. Haisley learned to walk in the hallway of an oncology floor. At the time, it didn’t feel symbolic. It just felt like a small pocket of light in a place that usually holds a lot of heaviness. She

02/27/2026

🧵 A small experiment in culture, creativity, and the compounding power of attention.

This week, a planning slide turned into a digital embroidered pillow.

It makes more sense than it sounds.

What started as a conversation about shopper behavior became a reflection on partnership equity, translation, and why attention compounds over time. Not because of one clever moment — but because of consistency.

The pillow doesn’t exist. It was never meant to.

The act of translation was the point.

Full reflection here:
https://meanwhile.ghost.io/whi-turned-a-slide-into-a-pillow/

If you’re in the middle of building something with someone right now, what’s the small moment you might be overlooking?

Meanwhile.

Part of me hesitated before writing this. Not because it felt extra, but because I didn’t want it to come across as braggy. The more I replayed it in my mind, though, the more I realized it wasn’t about a pillow at all. It was about paying attention

02/24/2026

I never imagined revival would include my two-year-old in my bedroom.

And yet, that’s exactly what happened. Link in the comments.

02/24/2026

Four Valentine’s Days.
One 120-pound dog.

Marriage looks different from what I thought it would.
Better, actually.
There’s significantly more dog hair than I anticipated.

Link in comments below.

02/24/2026

I build systems for a living.

At home, I married someone who doesn’t.

For a long time I thought one of us needed to change.
Now I think we were built this way on purpose.

Link in the comments.

02/24/2026

Building something small inside something full.

(Link in comments)

02/24/2026

None of this was actually about a truck.
It just looked like it was.

(This one surprised me.)

Link in the comments.