When Newbery Medalist Meg Medina was a kid, she had a babysitter — señora Mimí.
"She was sort of heavyset and she had dyed red hair and she had a gold tooth in the back and she had freckles on her hands," remembers Medina.
She was a wonderful babysitter but kind of a pain in the neck, as well — Medina says you could look at the things on her coffee table, but you definitely couldn’t touch them. "She felt this was a very important skill," she says. "We used to stand at that table and she'd have us practice, like putting our hands behind our back, and you could lean forward and look at all the pretty things."
Then, when Medina was five years old, her mother announced that their family — tías and abuelos — would be coming from Cuba, and Medina’s grandmother would become her babysitter. Not without some glee, Medina fired señora Mimí immediately.
"I marched myself right up to that apartment. I said, 'señora Mimí, lo siento. I'm very sorry but, you know, you're out. My abuela is coming. I don't need you anymore,'" Medina laughs. But the joke was on her — señora Mimí went exactly nowhere. She became friends with Medina’s grandmother, and they’d often drink coffee together. "She loved us," says Medina.
Now, Meg Medina is honoring señora Mimí — and caregivers everywhere — in her new children’s book, No More Señora Mimí, illustrated by Brittany Cicchese.
"I knew from past research that Meg's stories are all based a bit on her past experiences," says Cicchese. She had a hunch that señora Mimí was based on a real person, but she emphatically did not want to know what she looked like. "Because as soon as I read the manuscript," she explains, "I just had this image of who señora Mimí was. I could see her smile, the way she braided her hair, the way she walked. I knew that if I saw a photo, it would change it in some way. And I wanted to capture that initial energy."
And, in fact, the fictional señora Mimí looks nothing like the real señora Mimí. In the book, señora Mimí is young — she has a "two-tooth" baby, Nelson, and a "no-tooth" dog named Pancho. She and the little girl in the story, Ana, wear cozy matching sweaters. There’s nary a gold tooth in sight. They eat buttered crackers together at the kitchen table.
"When I think of the breakfast of my childhood," says Medina, "I think of my Cuban crackers and butter and that milky coffee." Cicchese did want to see a photo of the crackers, to make sure she was getting them right — she also ordered some online to try.
Ana — like a young Meg Medina — starts out super excited that her abuela is coming. "I bet Abuela will let me stop and play whenever I want," Ana tells señora Mimí.
"Abuela is coming to live with me!" Ana tells her teacher.
Until Ana realizes oh — a new babysitter means no more señora Mimí.
"This is a story that is quiet, right? The change that happens, happens quietly inside her," says Medina.
Ana realizes that she won’t be able to tell señora Mimí the best parts of her day, or open her lobby mailbox with the little silver key, or press the top elevator button anymore. In one of Cicchese’s illustrations, Ana sits under the table, curled up with a blanket and Pancho the dog. "No more señora Mimí," Ana whispers to Pancho, sadly.
"That was so tender to me," says Medina. "This moment where she can appreciate that she’s going to lose something. She’s gaining something. She’s also going to lose something."
Illustrator Brittany Cicchese says she wanted No More Señora Mimí to be a comforting story with lots of warm tones. "You'll see a lot of warm, glowing yellows and rosy pinks," she says. Cicchese set the story during autumn, at the start of the school year, since it’s also a time of change. "I think that echoes the story quite nicely," she says.
Cicchese did the illustrations digitally, but her background is in traditional art. "I approached the story very much with that traditional mindset in building up the pieces as if I were working on a real painting," she explains. "That was really important to me to capture the looseness of traditional mediums like oil paints or oil pastels." Cicchese says the other benefit of working digitally was that it allowed her to capture the light. "You can go in and you can almost make a piece glow." And it does create a very warm, comforting effect.
No spoilers, but author Meg Medina says señora Mimí stayed a part of her life forever. "I hold a space for her in my heart," she says. "Señora Mimí is not buried very far from my real abuela in Flushing, Queens," Medina says. She wrote this children’s book in her honor.
"So many people raise kids," Medina says. There’s our parents, of course, but also older siblings, teachers, cousins, librarians, and neighbors. It’s easy to forget just how many people have a role in helping raise us.
"It feels good to know that there's this modern story for kids right now, but that there's a piece of this story that's also about remembering these wonderful women who helped raise me," says Medina. "It feels like we're paying them honor. You know, we're just honoring their memory."
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