Janice Airhart is an award-winning memoir writer who believes all our stories make a difference. Sharing them helps us connect with each other and broadens our worldview.
Just out from Lived Places Publishing!
“Advocating for Mentally Ill Family Members draws on personal experience and powerful interviews to shed light on the hidden struggles of families living with mental illness. With honesty and compassion, the book reveals how erratic behaviors strain relationships, how stigma silences families, and how advocacy becomes a vital yet exhausting necessity when navigating mental health systems.
Through stories of parents, children, partners, and siblings, Janice Airhart illustrates both the challenges and resilience of families who fight for the care and dignity of their loved ones. By capturing the lived realities of mental illness across different diagnoses, this book underscores the urgent need for stronger community support, better policies, and more compassionate systems of care.”
In 2007, at the age of fifty-five, Janice Airhart makes a radical career move. She sets aside decades of experience in laboratory science and writing to teach science to pregnant and parenting teen girls in Oklahoma.
Problem is, she knows science but has no clue how to teach it. Teen moms are often distracted, sick, or exhausted—sometimes all three. It takes creative strategies to get their attention, preferably inexpensive ones. Substituting cheap nearly pure ethanol (Everclear) from the liquor store for expensive lab-grade ethanol is an easy choice for a DNA lab that never fails to astonish, but possession of alcohol on school premises is strictly prohibited. Is it coincidence that the school’s strait-laced principal chooses that day to observe her lab, with a brown-paper-bagged pint of Everclear front and center? Apparently, she and her students all have a lot to learn.
Most women in the middle of their sixth decade are slowing down and planning for retirement. The children are grown; maybe there are grandchildren. That just wasn’t me. I wasn’t ready to chuck it all … not yet. Instead, I launched a new career as a science teacher to teen moms. Without a teaching certificate. Without teaching experience.
My story demonstrates it’s possible to overhaul a career and learn new skills even in midlife. In fact, if you’re open to new experiences, a later-life career can be transformational.
Mother of My Invention: A Motherless Daughter Memoir
When Janice Airhart was an infant, her mother was committed to a Louisiana mental hospital, and she spent most of the next 13 years institutionalized until her death in 1966. That no one in the family would speak about her schizophrenic mother convinced Airhart it was shameful to ask questions and that fears of inheriting her mother’s illness were justified.
Long after her mother’s death and after the deaths of everyone who’d known her before, Airhart obtained her mother’s hospital records, detailing everyday interactions and psychiatric …..
“This beautifully written and keenly observed memoir is heart-tugging and inspirational.”
Laurie Woodford, author of Unsettled: A Memoir
“An exquisitely written account of one woman’s path to discovery”
Myra Johnson, author of The Flowers of Eden and Till We Meet Again series
Airhart “brings hope to all those raised without mothers.”
Ellen Herbert, author of The Last Government Girl
Latest Blog Posts
Holiday Greetings!
Thanksgiving is over and Christmas is right behind! We had a houseful of company all last week and a table full on Thanksgiving Day, something for which I am very grateful. Our grandkids are teens and will all be out of high school in less than two years. Having everyone together is a blessing. We…
Home
I missed posting anything on Substack last week because my husband and I made a trip to Tulsa, Oklahoma to visit friends and to hold a book event for my latest book, Subject to Change: Teaching and Learning from Teen Moms. I spent the days prior to the trip obsessing over what to bring and…
Serving Others as a Path to Fulfillment
These are dark and uncertain times. I’m often overwhelmed by news of yet another deliberate cruelty or falsehood presented as fact by the current administration. I sometimes feel there is little I can do to effect change and a return to what I’ve always thought were basic American values: honesty, empathy, and care for each…
Essays and Short Stories
- “Migration,” in Concho River Review, Spring/ Summer, 2022
- How to Grow a $400 Squash
- “The Broadmoor,” One Woman’s Day website, October 19, 2020
- “My Pandemic Bubble,” Real Women Write, Dec. 2021 (Story Circle Network Anthology)
- “Keep Current With a Journal Club,” The Science Teacher, Jan. 2017
- “Walking Home” in The Sun (Readers Write), March, 2010
- “A Servant Story,” Lutheran Woman Today, July/Aug. 1998
Praise for Mother of my Invention: A Motherless Daughter Memoir
“Janice Airhart invites the reader into her story in this honest and vulnerable memoir. Mothers — alive or dead, present or absent — shape our lives whether we like it or not…. they bring us into the world, and after that point, it is a mixture of love and trauma. Airhart opens up her narrative to reach all of us — mothers and daughters.”
Rebecca Beardsall, author of My Place in the Spiral and The Unfurling Frond: A Memoir of Belonging and Becoming
“I was given MOTHER OF MY INVENTION by a friend and was so moved by it. This memoir tells a story many of us have lived. While this account begins in deep sadness, the author brings hope to all those raised without mothers.”
Ellen Herbert, author of The Last Government Girl
“An exquisitely written account of one woman’s path to discovery, not only about her absent mother but about herself and her place and purpose in the world. “
Myra Johnson, author of The Flowers of Eden and Till We Meet Again series
“This beautifully written and keenly observed memoir is heart-tugging and inspirational. As Airhart tells the story of her search to better understand her late mother who was institutionalized with schizophrenia, we are treated to poignant and powerful insights about family, loss, and finding/creating ways forward. This is a wonderful, heartfelt, and moving memoir.”
Laurie Woodford, author of Unsettled: A Memoir
Janice Airhart 