M.A.M.A. Issue n.7: Sandra Ramos O'Briant and Nusa Pavko
The ProCreate Project, the Museum of Motherhood and the Mom Egg Review are pleased to announce the 20th edition of this scholarly discourse intersects with the artistic to explore the wonder and the challenges of motherhood. Using words and art to connect new pathways between the academic, the para-academic, the digital, and the real, as well as the everyday: wherever you live, work, and play, the Art of Motherhood is made manifest. #JoinMAMA
January, 2017 The Pussy Bow by Christen Clifford and Privatising Motherhood by Karen Malpede
Art:
Mirror Mirror by Sandra Ramos O´briant – From Mom Egg Vol. 10 The Body Issue.
My mother told me I was beautiful. She was always saying stuff like that, telling me what a gorgeous baby I was, and how I’d won a Beautiful Baby contest and had my picture printed in a calendar. January was my month. She compared me to movie stars, and in high school tried to draw me out of a nerdy adolescence by telling me that I had sex appeal, an important item in her lexicon of female virtues. She never explained how to use that gift, but encouraged me to date.
One night, we watched an old Ava Gardner movie together — The Barefoot Contessa. I sat on the end of her bed and brushed my long hair, my head tilted to the side. She must have been watching me. “Your neck is the same as Ava Gardner’s,” she said. I looked at Ava, seductive in a gypsy dance, and couldn’t get past the cleft in her chin and the valley between her breasts.
“No, it’s not,” I said, more harshly than I intended.
We watched Jane Fonda in Barbarella together. “You look like Jane Fonda,” she said. My hair was lighter then, and laden with curls, like Jane’s.
“No, I don’t,” I said, and walked out of the room.
Many years later, my son was two years old and I still looked pregnant. “I’m too fat,” I told my mother.
“You’re beautiful,” she said with conviction, and looked at me with appraising eyes from my top to my round bottom. “You look like Jacqueline Bisset, only she’s too skinny.”
“I do?” I said, and studied my profile in the mirror.
My son’s in college now, and I still look pregnant. But I carry an image of myself that defies logic. I pass a mirror in my house, and out of the corner of my eye see a stranger. Who’s that matronly woman, shoulders slouched and with a crease between her eyebrows? I stop to examine my reflection, and a slow morph occurs. Straighten the shoulders, suck in my gut, and smile, and yes, there she is. Yes, tilt my head — yes, I still have it — Ava Gardner’s neck. The same.
Sandra Ramos O’Briant’s work has appeared in Café Irreal, Flashquake, riverbabble, In Posse, LiteraryMama, Whistling Shade, La Herencia, latinola.com, and The Copperfield Review. In addition, her short stories have been anthologized in Best Lesbian Love Stories of 2004, What Wildness is This: Women Write About the Southwest (University of Texas Press, Spring 2007), Latinos in Lotus Land: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature, (Bilingual Press, 2008), Hit List: The Best of Latino Mystery (Arte Publico (2009), and The Mom Egg (Half Shell Press, 2010). Read her work at www.thesandovalsisters.com and www.bloodmother.com.
Claire Griffy - Pregnancy Landscape
Claire Griffy is a psychotherapist practicing in Austin, Texas. She works with women, couples, and creative professionals. Her specialties include pregnancy and postpartum issues as well as trauma recovery.
Claire views therapy as a creative collaboration between science and the art of relationship. She is passionate about working with the unique stage of pregnancy and believes it calls for special attention to women’s emotional and mental health. It is her belief that the pregnancy journey can be used for personal growth, exploration, and a deeper connection to life.
The way I have come to know pregnancy as an incubator for creativity is from the effect it has had on me as a clinician. Working with clients within their pregnancy landscape has enlivened the way I work and shifted my clinical interests.
At first, when I began witnessing a number of my clients swim to creative and transformative depths during their pregnancy, I attributed it to the type of people they were. Naturally tuned into the aesthetics of the world around them, involved in creative projects, and inclined toward introspection. Yet, the more women I saw in pregnancy, those with diverse backgrounds and interests, the more I realized this heightened creativity was always present.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ description of creativity in her book, Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of The Wild Woman Archetype, perfectly captures how I experience it within therapeutic work,
“Creativity emanates from something that rises, rolls, surges, and spills into us rather than from something that just stands there hoping that we might, however circuitously, find our way to it. If it finds no inlet in us, it backs up, gathers energy, and rams forward again until it breaks through.”
I often see the same woman in pre-pregnancy and pregnancy. When this happens, it feels as though everything before pregnancy existed in a brainstorming phase, while pregnancy is now catapulting us into the “work.”
The immediate experience of pregnancy, whether it shows up as a container for suffering or joy, allows for direct access to a client’s inner canvas. It brings women up close and personal with their inner wisdom, imagination, sensations, resources, and their dance with life, change, loss, and uncertainty. It is with access to these that we begin to paint.
An example that may help contextualize this concept is working with a woman’s relationship with her body. There is a range of how this may show up. It may be an issue of poor body image or low self-worth. For women with a history of trauma, especially sexual abuse, this can show up as one’s desire to stay disconnected from their body, which has become a vortex of shame in their experience.
For women who broke up with their bodies years ago due to trauma, we may touch this, we may talk about it, we may spend months poking and prodding for an entry access point. But when her baby kicks inside her belly, demanding that she be brought back to her body, the work begins.
For those who live in a constant state of war with their inner critic, I can point out their strengths every session for years. Have them repeat affirmations to themselves every day. But again, pregnancy becomes a powerful agent. It pulls her to a realization of what her body is capable of. There is no way to manufacture the moment a woman finds out her body innately knows how to care for life. And finally, we see a new relationship to self begin budding.
Clients experience heightened creativity differently. Women report their dreams being extremely vivid, wanting to record the process of their birth in a creative medium, a pull toward writing and storytelling, and revisiting memories that hold new meaning and experiences through the lens of pregnancy.
But the common theme is similar: It gives us, the therapist and client, direct access to emotions, ideas, and experiences that previously we had only been able to talk about.
Given this was such a common experience in my practice, it was important for me to find out how frequently discussed it was. I was relieved to come across ProCreate Project after sifting through endless articles and blogs dedicated to “getting your post-baby body back” and breastfeeding. Do not get me wrong. These are all important topics. But these topics do not always allow room to marvel at and harness the gifts of pregnancy.
It is important to point out that pregnancy being a time of heightened creativity does not necessarily translate to a magically wonderful experience.
A number of my clients struggle during pregnancy: with anxiety, physical discomfort, grief, and depression. While pregnancy is an incredibly unique experience for each person, I believe this creative force remains. A force that invites us to inhabit a place that feels real and intensely present, while not always joyous.
My mission as a therapist is to reignite an awe and respect for the process, in all forms it shows up as.
Creativity bubbles up like a force that one must reckon with. A desire to put something on paper, attach an experience to colors or melodies so it can more accurately match the way it lives inside us. We absolutely have an opportunity to embrace the creativity pregnancy gifts us with to reach new depths of personal growth.
@atxtherapy
M.A.M.A. Issue n.6: Autumn Stephens and Sabrina Mahfouz
The ProCreate Project, the Museum of Motherhood and the Mom Egg Review are pleased to announce the 6th edition of this scholarly discourse intersects with the artistic to explore the wonder and the challenges of motherhood. Using words and art to connect new pathways between the academic, the para-academic, the digital, and the real, as well as the everyday: wherever you live, work, and play, the Art of Motherhood is made manifest. #JoinMAMA
October 1, 2015: “Elderly Prima Gravida,” by Autumn Stephens. Featured Artist, Sabrina Mahfouz.
Art:
AUTUMN STEPHENS
ELDERLY PRIMA GRAVIDA
Originally published in Mom Egg Review Vol. 13
History of a Girl
A blue cloud aureoles her hair, making her a madonna or hinting at the moment a smidge past perfection when petals begin their downward drift.
Labor Day
Without the children, she is left with too much fruit. Three platters on the drainboard, their chips and cracks mitigated by heaps of peaches, nectarines, plums. The sweet stones she dreamed of all winter, like Demeter, like her own mother, mourning loss of fragrance, sipping boiling water for comfort, reaching back toward a hotter life.
Spoiler
In the movie the children die. She should have chosen a different show, some summer trifle where the men are sex fools and the women are goddesses, sassy but forgiving. All the mistakes she’s made, all the dangerous omissions. That afternoon when she and her friend sat griping pleasurably on the park bench: how did it happen that they commanded sunscreen, water bottles, yet still fell short, failed to precaution the two boys, the girl, against every danger? Failed to extend the protective mantle of maternal instruction against stray dogs, strange men, slippery banks, polluted water, so on. Failed to say, quite explicitly, that it was forbidden to hike up to the waterfall. But then, they were old mothers, decades fanning out behind them as they imagined their children into life. They had gotten away with murder, redefined the status quo. At what point would exceptions no longer be made? At what point would there no longer be time?
Fruitless
For sex he wakes her, laying a hand on some round part. It’s too early—she’s set the alarm for a hundred years. “Go away, I’m practicing,” she says. Curved forms appear lenient but she’s not. No one’s worn a white petticoat since maybe 1969. Under sweatshirt and mom jeans, her spotted skin, her graying hair.
Autumn Stephens is the author of the Wild Women series of women’s history and humor, editor of two personal essay anthologies, and former co-editor of The East Bay Monthly. She has written for The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, and numerous other publications. She conducts writing workshops for cancer survivors in Oakland, Calif., and teaches private writing classes.
Autumn Stephens is the author of the Wild Women series of women’s history and humor, editor of two personal essay anthologies, and former co-editor of The East Bay Monthly. She has written for The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, and numerous other publications. She conducts writing workshops for cancer survivors in Oakland, Calif., and teaches private writing classes.
About Sabrina Mahfouz:
Sabrina is currently the Poet in Residence for Cape Farewell, an organisation that provides a cultural response to climate change. She is an Associate Artist alumni at the Bush Theatre in London; a Writer at Liberty for the UK civil rights charity LIBERTY and the Creative Director of poetry production company P.O.P.
She is a World Economic Forum Global Shaper on the executive board of the London hub. Sabrina studied at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, receiving her MA in International Politics and Diplomacy and at King’s College, University of London, receiving her BA (Hons) in Classics and English Literature.
Her creative work has been recognized with a number of awards. Most recently, these include receiving a 2014 Fringe First Award; the 2013 Sky Arts Futures Fund Award; an Old Vic New Voices Underbelly Edinburgh Award; a UK Young Artists Award; The Stage Award for Best Solo Performance 2011 nomination; an Old Vic New Voices TS Eliot Award and a Westminster Prize for New Playwrights. Her first book, The Clean Collection, is available from Bloomsbury.
She currently working on new project as writer and producer. Seem more here