Sassy Girls Marvelous Moms

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bra project progress photo 3even more progress on sassy girls - photo of bra in progressmaterials for "Sassy Girls Marvelous Moms"

For the last few days I’ve been stuck at home with a flu bug.

I’m awful company for anyone.

So is the bug.

So since I’m homebound, I’ve been finishing up an art bra that will be displayed at Paint the Town Pink, our annual fundraiser for Florence Crittenton Home. Mine is a teaser/sample bra for another fundraiser we’re having in August: “Support the Girls.”  So this one’s title is, “Sassy Girls – Marvelous Moms.” It’s a  multi-level visual pun.  About motherhood. About the dichotomy between elegance and practicality; between picking up toys, wiping dirty noses or wearing a nursing bra — and stepping out in black sequins and stilettos. Can we be both Sassy and Sensitive? Can we be a hot-date and a marvelous mom at the same time? I think yes!

This piece is dedicated to the many teen mothers at Flo Crit who put their babies first, almost every one of them breastfeeding as long as possible even though they go to school, have jobs and other obligations. All trying as hard as they can to give their babies a healthy loving start in life.  These young moms still long on some level to be kids (they are still kids.)  Yet they obviously have grown-up responsibilities. And … not to forget, still have the same desires and dreams any teenage girl might have. She wants to succeed, to be pretty and smart and sassy and …  have a hot date now and then. All that in addition to becoming a marvelous mom.

bra progress holga photo

it's tactile mixed with visual ... alot of arranging and rearranging before anything gets sewn on or glued down

Check back Saturday morning for more pics of the final piece.  And after PINK, for pics of the event. I hope I’m over this blankety-blank FLU by tomorrow night!

Thanks for stopping by.

Woman-Child

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Florence Crittenton’s Center for Pregnant and Parenting Teens is holding our annual benefit gala, Paint the Town Pink, on February 12th, 2011. My husband, Tim Carney has donated an artful piece of his woodworking for the last three years. This is the second year I have donated art items to the Pink auction. I hope that all of our friends will choose to attend and hopefully bid on our items or others as your whim strikes.

I donated a large print (22 x 36) of one of my favorite mixed media digital paintings, “Woman-Child.”  I made this piece as I struggled with my feelings and thoughts about working with the teen moms at Florence Crittenton.

This work is the most fulfilling work I have done in my life. I cannot imagine not doing it. I love it and struggle with it. I am learning and growing (personally) each day because of my coworkers but especially because of the teens I work with. They are amazing, strong, funny, inspiring and powerful people.

Please consider reserving a couple of chairs at the Gala — or a whole table. See you there.

Woman-Child

I work with a young woman who has grown up too soon. She is caged by labels: her own, her family’s, society’s. A woman still a child, neither here nor there yet mothering a child. A girl who hasn’t crossed the bridge—the liminal place suspended between back-when and what’s-next. She clutches at her past as if falling from it would kill her, yet the thing she clings to, is just the nearest shore.

She stands at a bridge of stone and wood and air: that dangerous space between times. Her life will move on, like the river below. Or stand still watching, waiting. Always waiting.

Stone: my caring rests like pebbles on my tongue, a hard reminder always rolling between thoughts, that stones can break my teeth, sink heavy in my heart. Or stones can build foundations: for bridges, shelter, justice, schools.

Wood: I can open the cage door, try to draw her out. I can point to the other shore — the gated arch, an open hand, her future. I cannot protect her from uncertainty and pain. There are no guarantees.

Air: I will remind her to breathe. I will teach her to dance. I will not carry her across in my cupped hands, but build for her some wings.

Metta: Loving Kindness

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may all beings be happy…
may all beings know joy…
may all beings be free of suffering…

~~ SAMADHI ~~

"Samadhi" copyright by Suren Rupasinghe

word cloud Metta

What Metta isn’t:

  • Metta isn’t the same thing as feeling good, although it’s possible to feel good and for that not to be metta. We can feel good, but be rather selfish and inconsiderate, for example. Metta has a quality of caring about others.
  • Metta isn’t self-sacrifice.
  • Metta isn’t something unknown. We all experience Metta. Every time you feel pleasure in seeing someone do well, or are patient with someone who’s a bit difficult, or are considerate and ask someone what they think, you’re experiencing Metta.
  • Metta isn’t denying your experience. To practice Metta means that even if you don’t like someone, you can still have their welfare at heart.
  • Metta isn’t all or nothing. Metta exists in degrees, and can be expressed in such simple ways as simple as politeness and courtesy.
Best Friends

"Loving Kindness" copyright by Maureen Shaughnessy

What Metta Is:

  • Metta is an attitude of recognizing that all sentient beings (that is, all beings that are capable of feeling), can feel good or feel bad, and that all, given the choice, will choose the former over the latter.
  • Metta is a recognition of the most basic solidarity that we have with others, this sharing of a common aspiration to find fulfillment and escape suffering.
  • Metta is empathy. It’s the willingness to see the world from another’s point of view: to walk a mile in another person’s shoes.
  • Metta is the desire that all sentient beings be well, or at least the ones we’re currently thinking about or in contact with. It’s wishing others well.
  • Metta is friendliness, consideration, kindness, generosity.
  • Metta is an attitude rather than just a feeling. It’s an attitude of friendliness.
  • Metta is the basis for compassion. When our Metta meets another’s suffering, then our Metta transforms into compassion.
  • Metta is the basis for shared joy. When our Metta meets with another’s happiness or good fortune, then it transmutes into an empathetic joyfulness.
  • Metta is boundless. We can feel Metta for any sentient being, regardless of gender, race, or nationality.
  • It’s our inherent potential. To wish another well is to wish that they be in a state of experiencing Metta

How not to burn out

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Sometimes I take my work at Florence Crittenton too personally. I am working on that. My supervisor and coworkers are great at helping to remind me that what I do actually has postive effects on the girls, even though it may not be apparent now, or in the near future. I get frustrated and sometimes discouraged (dis-heartened literally) by their slow progress.

Yet I have to remember where our clients have come from: dysfunctional families, childhoods of neglect, abandonment, abuse, great trauma, sometimes lives surrounded by the wreckage of drug and alcohol using family members … when they come from this kind of childhood, just the fact that they are in our care at Florence Crittenton, is a step toward their future. A positive thing.

We nuture and guide these young mothers — in order that they may nurture and guide their own children.

We hold them so they can hold their children

We hold them in our hands so that they can hold their babies gently, with love and kindness, strength and knowledge. We show them the way and hope they will take the good road.

But the choice is theirs, not ours. We choose to give our hearts and souls– the best we can give — to our work, and pray that the young women in our care will choose wisely.  Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they fall. Sometimes they refuse to even get up off of the couch ground. We can only give them the tools and step back, let them go, and be there when they come back for a crash — or smooth — landing.

And then I can remember that I do give them something concrete and tangible. It may not take root for years … but the seed is planted.

Fall Art Walk in Downtown Helena

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Tonight is the big night: if you’re in Helena, Montana, come downtown and take a stroll through the many galleries and businesses that feature local artists. The Downtown Helena Fall Art Walk venues also offer appetizers and other delicious food, and sometimes live music. It’s one of the highlights of the fall season in our great town. Click the link above for a directory of venues and artists.

I have an exhibit of 15 of my mixed media pieces as part of the Helena Woodworker’s Guild Annual “Art of Wood” show. I am a member of the Guild and benefit by being able to fill the walls of the Placer Lobby (Cafe Zuppa) with my work. I’m pretty excited about this exhibit. Some of the pieces I am showing I haven’t displayed before and few Helenans have seen my work online. It will be fun to see folks’ responses.

Please come — enjoy the exquisite craftsmanship of the woodworkers and tell me what you think of my limited-edition prints.  I will also have the prints displayed in a small gallery in the Placer, from now until Dec. 23rd. So if you can’t come to the Art Walk tonight, please give me a call and I will meet you there to show you my work.

Here are four of the 15 prints I’ll have at the Placer tonight. They are all matted and framed (frames by Tim Carney – Mats and Assembly by Ghost Art Gallery)

My husband’s work is exquisite: Tim Carney will also exhibit a breakfast table with maple and leather stools. It’s titled, “Four Directions” — the inlay on the table top is of birds eye maple, grenadillo and ebony. Check it out.

Domestic Violence

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domesticviolence
Grace stood at the window, her
hands in warm suds washing
the only plate left
after the tantrum ….
the rest were broken: their wedding china,
a glass mixing bowl she’d found
at the GoodWill, a single
wine glass (the only one they’d had,
the one she’d used to pamper herself…
he drank from a jelly jar.)
– the rest was in shards, dangerous
fragments around her feet.
In the frosty evening light
she could barely make out
the forest edge — trees
like indifferent bystanders
and beyond those,
glimmering in the dusky glow
tiny headlights approaching on
the road into town.
The lights grew larger, swelled,
and she held her breath
for one long moment afraid
the car would turn in, that
she would have to choose
to go or stay.
the globes of light passed by
she let her breath run out
and shaking, went back to
washing the fragile painted blossoms on
the only plate left
after the tantrum.
– Maureen Shaughnessy 2005
______________________________

I work at Florence Crittenton’s Center for Pregnant and Parenting Teens. As the coordinator of our Independent Living Training (ILT) program, I am part of a team of upwards of 40 staff who model and teach independent living, parenting skills and life skills almost 24/7.

Some of the life skills we teach our young moms are relationship skills — in particular, how to create safe, healthy, balanced relationships for themselves and their children, as well as the warning signs of the opposite — unsafe, unhealthy, abusive, controlling or unbalanced relationships. This extends all the way from boyfriends in highschool who “stalk” a girl with texting, to physical, verbal and emotional abuse from a husband, partner or friend.

I originally wrote the poem above, and shot the accompanying photo, in November of 2005, long before I thought of working at Florence Crittenton. Domestic Violence Prevention and Ending Partner Abuse has for a very long time, been a passion for me. Recently I started thinking again about this topic and decided to post the above pieces here, in hopes some people I really care about will be moved to take action. May you be blessed, no matter where you are in your life’s journey, and may you find a place of Safety and Kindness. Namaste.

______________________________

– 5.3 million women are abused each year. Around the world, at least one in every three women has been beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused during her lifetime.– Intimate partner violence is primarily a crime against women. In 2001, women accounted for 85 percent of the victims of intimate partner violence (588,490 total) and men accounted for approximately 15 percent of the victims (103,220 total)

End Abuse (I use this website’s resources for teaching my series on Healthy Relationships at FCH)