If you're worried about that, make them public. Middle managers are easier to get than programmers, so you may have leverage walking up the chain to your boss's boss.
You should be sending status updates to your team's email list anyway, not just to your manager, as they are useful to all of your coworkers. I can't even begin to count the number of times that, upon hearing in a daily stand-up/status report that someone was working on or was about to begin working on a specific thing, I was able to give useful direction on it that saved hours of work. Teams that go off to work in isolated silos don't have good velocity. Sometimes the five seconds it takes to say "Yeah I tried that approach already and gave it up, so I recommend Y" can save days. And this will come from your coworkers more often than it will from your manager, so always send status updates to the whole team.
Qualified middle managers are not easier to get than programmers, in my experience. And if they (and their reports) are qualified, they'll not micromanage, nor need to.
If your manager is the kind that brow-beats when they can't find you, and, they forget things you tell them (in writing), then reminding them of the thing you have told them, in writing, to their bosses boss, will basically get you fired.
