One Year Later: What Fierce Mamas Taught Me in Its First Year

One year ago, on July 17, I launched Fierce Mamas.

If I'm honest, I couldn't have told you exactly what I was launching.

I knew that the years of caring for Virginia Grace had changed me. I knew that losing Jack had changed me. I knew that navigating disability, addiction, mental illness, insurance denials, schools, hospitals, courtrooms, pharmacies, and the thousand invisible jobs that accompany caring for another human being had left me with questions that weren't going away.

What I didn't know was that those questions were looking for one another.

So, instead of beginning with a strategic plan, I began with curiosity.

Looking back, I think that's exactly what Fierce Mamas spent its first year doing: figuring out why it exists.

At first, I imagined it might become an advocacy organization. Or perhaps a support group. Maybe it would be a storytelling project, or simply a place where caregivers could find one another. As the year unfolded, though, I realized those weren't competing ideas at all. They were different expressions of the same question:

How do we make the invisible work of caregiving visible?

That question has led me to places I never could have anticipated. It led to Gather, where a room full of people transformed old bills, denial letters, prescriptions, and insurance paperwork into the Scroll of Medical Entanglements, a collective work of art that asks us to look directly at the weight caregivers carry every day. It led to Listening Lunches, born from the belief that being deeply heard can be an act of care in itself. It has taken me into conversations with implementation scientists wondering how lived experience might reshape research, policymakers trying to understand why families so often become the project managers of fragmented systems, artists who make invisible labor visible, and caregivers who somehow continue showing up despite everything.

The conversations surprised me. They also changed me.

They also carried Fierce Mamas into rooms I never imagined I'd enter, contributing to conversations about implementation science, behavioral health, provider transparency, and the design of systems that too often depend on unpaid family labor.

One of the biggest shifts in my thinking this year was realizing that stories aren't simply a way of illustrating research. They're a form of evidence in their own right. When one family tells me they waited months to find treatment for a child, it's heartbreaking. When hundreds of families tell versions of the same story, they're describing the contours of a system. Patterns emerge. Gaps become visible. What initially feels like anecdote begins to look remarkably like data.

That realization has changed the way I think about advocacy. The stories aren't separate from the research; they are part of the research. Likewise, the art we've been making through Gather isn't separate from the advocacy. It's another language for understanding systems that often resist being understood through numbers alone.

Perhaps that's why I've come to see the conversations as the work itself.

I've also come to appreciate that, despite the name, Fierce Mamas was never really about mothers alone. It's about care, and about the people who quietly hold the world together through it. Parents, grandparents, partners, siblings, friends, neighbors, clinicians, teachers, and countless others all find themselves doing work that rarely appears in job descriptions or policy briefs but without which our systems would collapse.

One of the greatest surprises of this first year is that I wasn't actually looking for another support group.

What I was looking for, though I didn't have the language for it at the time, was a community of collaborators. I was looking for people willing to ask difficult questions together, to imagine systems that don't require families to become experts simply to survive, and to believe that art, storytelling, research, and policy might have more to say to one another than we've traditionally allowed.

Thankfully, I've found them.

Looking back, I'm struck by how little of this first year was built through strategy. Almost everything began the same way: a conversation, an introduction, a story, or someone saying, "You should meet..."

As we begin Year Two, I still don't have a five-year strategic plan. I'm not entirely sure I want one. What I do have is a clearer sense of what Fierce Mamas is for.

It exists because caregiving deserves to be witnessed. Because stories can illuminate systems. Because art sometimes reveals what spreadsheets cannot. And because every meaningful thing we've created this year has begun the same way: with someone willing to sit down, tell the truth about their experience, and trust that another person will recognize something of themselves in it.

If you've been part of this first year, thank you. Whether you've attended a Gather, shared your story, challenged my thinking, collaborated on a project, or simply read these words, you've helped shape Fierce Mamas into something I couldn't have imagined twelve months ago.

So I'll keep asking the question that seems to sit beneath all the others: What becomes possible when we stop treating caregiving as a private burden and begin recognizing it as work that belongs to all of us?

If that question interests you too, I hope you'll stay in the conversation.