Hello everyone! I’m Mackenzie Irick Milks, and I’m an Austin transplant by way of Atlanta, Georgia, and originally from Stamford, Connecticut. I come from a large Bermudian-American family, and spent my childhood traveling back and forth between the U.S. and that tiny island nation in the Atlantic that I also call home.
I graduated from Spelman College in Atlanta, GA, in 2002, with a degree in Psychology, and gave birth to my beautiful twin boys, Noah and Damon, in 2006. Working first in municipal mediation, then as a translator in under-served communities, and eventually at the local college in the Department of First-Year Programs, I tried many different careers in search of a fit, but none felt right. I wasn’t authentically passionate about anything as much as I was passionate about motherhood. I went to work at my family’s company as an HR Manager while I figured things out, and took up writing as a past-time that I thoroughly enjoyed in the meanwhile.
It was at my family’s company that I met my future husband, Matthew, a German-Danish sweetheart from Nebraska, with a love of all things entrepreneurial and a passion for the same authenticity I was striving for. He asked me out, we went on a date, and never dated anyone else from that moment on. We weren’t an obvious, easy, or immediate fit. We had numerous cultural, religious, political and even philosophical obstacles to hurdle (I’m a nonconformist and he’s a pragmatist), but our core values were the same, as was our love of family. He proposed, I happily accepted, and we set about planning the rest of our our lives together.
I’d toyed with pursuing my writing full time after winning a few local competitions, and my husband was an entrepreneur who could work from anywhere, so Matthew and I decided to moved to Austin with the twins in 2013 because we thought it would be a phenomenal place to own a business, and just as perfect a place to immerse myself in my budding passion of authorship.
We got married in the Hill Country in 2014, and after living downtown for a few years, we decided to buy our first home together out in that same beautiful Hill Country. We’re excited to watch the city grow so quickly as we grow right along with it. We welcomed a baby girl Leila in 2017, and are expecting another baby boy in the Fall (09/19).
I’m a stay at home mom these days, and I’m still working on finishing that initial manuscript I came to Texas to write. It’s hard dedicating myself to my children and to my ambitions with the same amount of intensity, or even focus, but I’m committed. Since moving to Texas, I’ve come to realize that the experience of motherhood can be one of the most isolating, exhausting, as well as unifying and gratifying ones a person can have in their lifetime, and I’ve journeyed along every point on that spectrum and back again. I think most moms have.
I hope that joining Austin Moms Blog and talking about my experiences as a single mother, a married mother, a mother of multiples, a mother of a child with learning differences, a c-section mother, a natural birth mother, a mother in an interracial marriage, a mother raising biracial children, a homeschooling mother, a traditional schooling mother, and every other title I proudly bear lends a unique voice to our conversations with this cool city as a mutual backdrop. I genuinely hope to engage with you all in open and honest dialogue as part of one big mama tribe. Love and light.
