What grief became, what this first year taught me, and where Fierce Mamas is going next.
|
|
|
| |
FIERCE MAMAS
|
YEAR ONE COMPLETE
|
One year ago, I hit publish.
|
I had a logo, a website, a head full of ideas, and an awful lot of conviction. What I did not have was a roadmap—or any real certainty about what Fierce Mamas would become.
|
I knew what had brought me here: years of navigating complex medical conditions with my kids, Virginia Grace and Jack. Years of watching families become experts because they had no other choice. Years of learning how differently compassion is distributed depending on the diagnosis attached to the person you love.
|
I knew I couldn’t unknow what those experiences had taught me. So I started building.
|
Right now, Fierce Mamas is still, in many ways, just me. But every conversation, every story entrusted to me, and every person who has shown up has stitched another piece into what it is becoming.
|
Most organizations spend their first year figuring out what they do.
|
Fierce Mamas spent its first year figuring out why it exists.
|
|
| |
| | ONE YEAR LATER
| What Fierce Mamas Taught Me in Its First Year
| I began with questions I thought I understood. Then other people arrived carrying their own knowledge, histories, losses, and refusals.
| The questions changed. The work changed. I changed with it.
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
The Care Creates the Kinship
|
People sometimes ask where the name Fierce Mamas came from.
|
The honest answer is that half of it came from grief. The other half came from defiance.
|
Fierce Mamas did not begin with a strategic plan. It began because I needed somewhere for my love to go.
|
| |
|
|
|
Care, Made Visible
|
Earlier this year, Fierce Mamas invited every candidate for Shelby County Mayor to answer questions grounded in caregivers’ lived experience.
|
We asked about adolescent treatment safety, mental health and substance use care, youth justice, provider accountability, public data, and what it would mean to treat caregivers as part of the care team rather than as collateral or afterthought.
|
Mickell Lowery was the only candidate to respond. Following the August 6 election, I’ve republished his answers in full and exactly as submitted. Read them here.
|
The questionnaire is both a public record and a starting point. These commitments now belong to the community—and Fierce Mamas intends to keep the questions visible.
|
| | “So when I talk about mental health support in schools, or accountability for providers, or making sure families have a voice in how systems are run, I'm not speaking from a distance. I'm speaking as someone who has been on the other side of those systems and knows how it feels when they don't work. Caregivers belong at the center of this strategy because they're the ones holding it all together. My administration will reflect that.”
— Mayor-Elect, Mickell Lowery
|
|
| | |
|
|
|
|
Gather: Making Visible What Caregiving Leaves Behind
|
Gather is an ongoing creative series presented by Fierce Mamas and ShapeShifter Art School & Gallery. It brings caregivers together to make meaning from the materials, memories, and stories that accumulate around disability, illness, addiction, aging, grief, recovery, and the labor of everyday care.
|
Our first three sessions centered on Entanglements, a Gather project in which participants created the Scroll of Medical Entanglements—a growing collective record of the paperwork, objects, and administrative debris that caregiving leaves behind.
|
At our most recent gathering, we began Seen in Layers, a self-portrait project rooted in the practice of witness: looking intently, telling the truth about what we see, and allowing ourselves to be seen in return.
|
Beginning with black-and-white photographs, participants looked closely at their own images and named what they saw. Then others reflected back what they saw—honestly, tenderly, and without looking away from either the beauty or the difficulty.
|
The Scroll bears witness to what caregiving asks us to carry.
|
The portraits bear witness to the people carrying it.
|
We’ll continue building on that practice with photographs, vellum, and other layered materials on August 15 and September 12 at ShapeShifter. No artistic experience or previous attendance is necessary—only curiosity.
|
| |
|
| |
Help Us Plan Future Gather Sessions
|
We’re planning future Gather sessions and want to choose days and times that work for as many caregivers as possible—a sentence that caregiving schedules may find darkly amusing, but we’re going to try.
|
Please take our short poll and select all the options that could work for you. You don’t need to have attended Gather before, and responding does not commit you to participate.
|
|
| |
|
What Do You Want People to Understand?
|
Fierce Mamas is built from the knowledge people acquire while loving, caring, surviving, navigating, waiting, appealing, improvising, and refusing to give up.
|
We want to hear from caregivers, family members, and people living with complex medical conditions about what these systems look like from the inside.
|
You do not need a polished essay or a tidy conclusion. You might have one moment you cannot stop thinking about, a piece of paperwork that tells an entire story, something you wish a provider had understood, or knowledge you earned the hard way and want someone else to have.
|
Sharing something with Fierce Mamas does not automatically mean agreeing to have it published. We will discuss privacy, attribution, consent, and how—or whether—you want your experience shared before anything becomes public.
|
If there is something you want people to understand, we are listening.
|
|
| |
|
Bring Fierce Mamas Into the Room
|
Fierce Mamas is interested in partnerships that make caregiving more visible and bring people into meaningful conversation across diagnoses, roles, and institutions.
|
Invite Fierce Mamas to facilitate a Gather workshop at your workplace, place of worship, school, community organization, conference, or gathering. Invite me to speak about caregiving across complex medical conditions, lived experience as evidence, navigating fragmented systems, grief, advocacy, or the creative work of making private burdens visible.
|
Or bring us an idea we haven’t considered yet.
|
|
|
| |
YEAR TWO
|
I don’t have a five-year plan carved into stone. I do have a direction: more listening, more making, more evidence, more partnerships, and more opportunities to transform private burdens into public understanding.
|
A year ago, I thought I was starting an advocacy organization.
|
Now I think I’m building something that lives somewhere between a front porch, a research lab, an art studio, and a troublemaking committee.
|
That feels exactly right.
|
Thank you for reading, questioning, making, showing up, and helping create somewhere for all this fierce and unbearable love to go.
|
In fierce gratitude,
|
|
P.S. A quick note about why you’re receiving this
|
You’re receiving this because you’re a friend, have participated in Gather, or work in a space connected to this work—and I wanted you to know what has taken shape in my life over the past year.
|
This message does not mean I’m assuming your permission to send future Fierce Mamas emails. If you’d rather not receive occasional updates, that will not hurt my feelings in the slightest. Just send me a note, and I won’t send you further Fierce Mamas communications. 😊
|
|
| |
|
