Kansas City, Mo. ? Sheila Johnson is the single mother of 17- and 23-year-old daughters and has one grandchild. She’s also caring for an aging mother and trying to pay off more than $100,000 in student loans.

While her job as a sales executive pays around $75,000, the increasing cost of gasoline, food and other daily expenses has curtailed her ability to save money, and she is afraid things may get worse.

“I have never, ever experienced the crunch I’m feeling now,” the 40-year-old Johnson told Michelle Obama during a roundtable discussion of women’s issues Thursday at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. “And I cannot imagine families who have not been as blessed as I am, how are they surviving, how are they able to make it from one day to the next?”

The roundtable discussion was one of a series of such gatherings Obama is holding to listen to women’s concerns and promote the presidential campaign of her husband, Democrat Barack Obama.

The five women chosen to talk to Obama were from varying economic situations, but they all discussed how difficult the current economy has made it to pay bills and provide good lives for their children.

The main subjects they raised were the high cost of health insurance, college loans, gasoline prices and providing adequate education for children.

Obama said she had heard similar stories across the country.

“These are working folks, many with jobs we would all covet, college education, good trade jobs,” Obama said. “This is sort of the state of things for people who are working, with no clear emergency going on … We have to begin to recognize the crunch we’re putting people in.”

Later, at a private Mission Hills, Kan., home, Gov. Kathleen Sebelius joined a number of dignitaries from Missouri and Kansas at a $1,000-a-head fundraiser.

Sebelius, who has been mentioned as a possible vice presidential candidate, talked in detail about Michelle Obama’s life, according to a pool report from the event.