What grief became, what this first year taught me, and where Fierce Mamas is going next.
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FIERCE MAMAS
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YEAR ONE COMPLETE
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One year ago, I hit publish.
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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.
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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.
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I knew I couldn’t unknow what those experiences had taught me. So I started building.
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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.
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Most organizations spend their first year figuring out what they do.
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Fierce Mamas spent its first year figuring out why it exists.
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| | 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.
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I BOUGHT A DOMAIN NAME BECAUSE I COULDN’T SLEEP
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People sometimes ask where the name Fierce Mamas came from.
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The honest answer is that half of it came from grief. The other half came from defiance.
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Fierce Mamas did not begin with a strategic plan. It began because I needed somewhere for my love to go.
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Care, Made Visible
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Earlier this year, Fierce Mamas invited every candidate for Shelby County Mayor to answer questions grounded in caregivers’ lived experience.
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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.
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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 it here.
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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.
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Gather: Making Visible What Caregiving Leaves Behind
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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.
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Our first three sessions centered on Entanglements, one of the art projects taking shape within Gather. Together, participants created the Scroll of Medical Entanglements, a growing collective record of the paperwork, objects, and administrative debris that caregiving leaves behind.
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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.
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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.
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The Scroll bears witness to what caregiving asks us to carry.
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The portraits bear witness to the people carrying it.
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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.
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Help Us Plan Future Gather Sessions
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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.
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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.
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Bring Fierce Mamas Into the Room
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Fierce Mamas is interested in partnerships that make caregiving more visible and bring people into meaningful conversation across diagnoses, roles, and institutions.
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Invite us 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.
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Or bring us an idea we haven’t considered yet.
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This work is still taking shape, and I’m especially interested in creative collaborations that connect caregivers, families, artists, researchers, educators, clinicians, advocates, and communities that might not otherwise find themselves at the same table.
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If something here resonates with your community, let’s talk about what we might make possible together.
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YEAR TWO
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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.
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A year ago, I thought I was starting an advocacy organization.
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Now I think I’m building something that lives somewhere between a front porch, a research lab, an art studio, and a troublemaking committee.
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That feels exactly right.
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Thank you for reading, questioning, making, showing up, and helping create somewhere for all this fierce and unbearable love to go.
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In fierce gratitude,
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