Photo courtesy of Biography.com

Last week, at the Museum of the Moving Image, Leslie Stahl (60 Minutes)  introduced Joan Ganz Cooney, the creator of Sesame Street,  by sharing some of the honors  she has received:  Presidential Medal of Freedom, 13 honorary degrees from America’s most elite schools, and of course, the unique distinction of being ‘Big Bird’s Mommy.’ Stahl quipped that although she and Joan are good friends, “you don’t really get to know about your best friends until you Google them.” Seeing these women together on stage, one could not help but think: what a lovely pairing of ground-breaking role models.  But these two share another distinction:  Sesame Street and 60 Minutes both debuted in 1968- 43 years ago! And both shows are still going strong.

Cooney described the 1960’s as a time of tremendous opportunity. “Change was in the air and you could do everything. Government and private business collaborated, and the world was ready to do something for kids.” (Head Start began 1965)

 
Melissa, of Momasphere, has re-discovered her passions by leaving city life behind and living on a farm.
Momasphere is thrilled to announce our first event after a long absence, a workshop aptly named Rediscover Your Life Purpose. It seems like that’s exactly what we’ve both been doing! We all know it’s really important to be able to take a step back sometimes to re-evaluate where we are, though as mothers, we don’t always give ourselves permission to do that. Balancing everything we want to do, with everything we have to do, is rarely simple, and often, even prioritizing is sometimes out of our control. But, finding our true calling is essential, if we want to be the best we can be…whether it’s at home, at work, on a farm, in a studio or on a court. It has been an incredibly productive and busy time for us, as Melissa went from being a Hip Slope Mama to a bonafide country mama, and Ellen became a successfully published children’s book author. We have both been around the ‘country,’ Melissa, Connecticut farm style, and Ellen literally from West to East on book tours.

Melissa completely changed pace, stopping not only to smell the roses, peaches, pears and apples that she picks daily around her farm when in season, but also re-experiencing the wonders of birth with baby cows, and barn yard kittens, and this spring, building a huge, experimental biodome to grow the family’s food year round. Melissa is also working on becoming a certified organic farmer and Non-GMO food advocate and speaker. She has also set up a painting studio in her house and is re-discovering her artist within.

  Ellen, of Momasphere, has followed her dreams to become a successful children's book author.

Meanwhile Ellen’s new picture book, Jumping Jenny, about a little girl who channels her passion for jumping to raise money for a school in Uganda, has captured the interest of psychologists dealing with children with special needs, health educators to encourage physical activity, communities involved  in social action projects, schools raising awareness for inclusion and bullying and kids who just plain love the book. The book was recently picked up by the PJ Library to the tune of 10,000 copies!

As Melissa is making progress on creating Momasphere, CT., and Ellen holds down the fort in Brooklyn, we look forward to offering enriching, engaging, enjoyable programs for moms in Brooklyn and Connecticut, beginning with this wonderful workshop with Career and Life Coach Anne Baker. As we continue to muddle through, we understand that rediscovering our life purpose can serve as a beacon of light in these challenging times. We are all works in progress, rediscovering our purpose as we go, integrating what we have learned in the past, with our aspirations for the future. Perhaps more than ever, we strongly believe that Whole Women Make Whole Moms.

Click here for more information and to sign up for the upcoming workshop, Rediscover Your Life Purpose, on Thursday, March 22, 7:00-9:30pm, at our old friend and great host, Park Slope Eye. In addition to small group work, break-out sessions, and actionable hand-outs, we will have time for networking and reconnecting over wine and snacks. Anne is also offering a complimentary coaching session to continue the momentum of the workshop or to help you take action on any other life or career issues.

By Ellen Bari

I was not quite three when my mother was invited to sub for a kindergarten teacher who was out on maternity leave. She took me along for the six-month ride, as I guess she imagined it could only be positive for me to be amongst older kids, in a learning environment.  I have a few vague, happy memories from that time, but there is one experience that I might not remember as well, had it not become part of the family mythology. It seems that on more than one occasion, one of the ‘big boys’ attacked my artistic talents. He would come up to my easel, survey my artwork, and say: You Scribble Scrabble! Apparently, each time I was crushed. Had I known that years later Whitney Ferre, Creatively Fit founder, would use scribbles as a technique for reaching The Artist Within, the title of her book, the sting of this boy’s insult may have been minimized.

Recently, Whitney proved the power of her technique to an intimate group of not-just moms at the delightful Linger Cafe and Lounge in Brooklyn.  The event, Creatives and Cocktails,  co-presented with Momasphere and Melissa Anne Colors, gave us  a chance to see for ourselves how a scribble on a page can shut down the left brain, making room for the right brain and the silenced artist within. Though as children, we seem to have a natural ability to make art without judgement, with age, an unfortunate and often cruel, internal critic squelches our ability to put crayon to paper and just let it flow.

By Ellen Bari

The 40^th anniversary of Earth Day, seems like a perfect opportunity for us moms to reflect upon the state of our planet and the small things we can do to help. We are (slowly) becoming aware of the problems: our food is often chemically treated and genetically modified, our water is frequently contaminated with toxic chemicals, our wasteful habits are filling landfills, gas prices are soaring, our resources are running out - the list goes on.

So what can we do?  Tons. There are so many easy ways families can contribute to going green, beginning with simple ways to conserve energy, like shutting down and unplugging electronics and setting our thermostats a few degrees lower in the winter/ higher in the summer.  

We can also be mindful of our water consumption by washing clothes in cold water;   filling reusable bottles with filtered tap water, taking shorter showers, installing low-flow shower heads and planting drought-tolerant native plants.

By Ellen Bari

Fear. Loneliness. Isolation. These are some of the emotions shared at Momasphere’s recent screening and discussion of Who Does She Think She Is? Sounds like a real downer. Well actually, though the sentiments that were shared were not all particularly uplifting, acknowledging our challenges and sharing some possible solutions was liberating…and perhaps even exhilarating. The packed house of moms, and one dad, mostly artists, laughed together throughout the first half of the film, when introduced to the film’s main protagonists-5 artists who juggle worlds of artistic expression and motherhood, as delicately as a basketball player spins a ball atop an index finger. However, as the film progressed, the laughter ceased as we learn that three out of five women end up alone. We even watch one of the marriages fall apart during the course of the filming, a development that many of us did not see coming. Rahti Gorfein, of Make a Living Creatively, one of three creativity coaches on hand to facilitate a vibrant and directed conversation, pointed out that though this woman’s husband tells us early on that his daughters have to learn that the world is not predictable, he is not able to follow his own advice when it comes to his wife’s need to pursue her creative calling as a performer. In all cases the husbands felt that their partners had chosen their art above their responsibilities as mothers and wives. Many of us related to a familiar sentiment shared by Mayumi Oda, a Japanese artist/activist/mentor, who tells of an interchange with her husband, shortly before he left. Exasperated, he tells her, “I want a wife!” to which she replies, “I want a wife, too!”

By Whitney Ferre

I love the quote by Albert Einstein, “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” It reminds me that whatever the problem, to find a solution there must first be a shift in our thought process. So when I learned about the documentary “Who Does She Think She Is?” I immediately went to, “where does the shift need to happen?” As the mother of three school age children, a wife, an artist, an author, and an entrepreneur, I have intimate knowledge of the struggles faced by creative women.

Where is the shift here? The guilt has been created by the society outside of ourselves. So, it is within ourselves that we will find the solution. I see two opportunities to create a shift within ourselves. Let me speak to my own experience to illustrate.

First, as hard as it can be, I know that I need to protect my creative time. If I feel “guilty” about taking the time to create, I am by default validating the position that mothers “should” spend extra time devoted to family, or “should” only engage in activity outside the family that produces an income. When I align with the “why I need to create”, then I can explain to my husband and kids that this activity is not optional. Over the years, I have had to work, sculpt, carve, illustrate for my family how important my creative activity is, as well as how important it is for all of us. I can also stand firm and let them know that they do not want to be living with the woman who has not had her time in the studio. As a result, they spend more time creating, drawing, painting, building, imagining. I have been able to create this family culture, but only because I made a shift within that created a shift outside of me.

By Scott Sager

New Years is upon me, bringing thoughts of change and self-improvement. I am overwhelmed by suggestions to lose weight, be a better father or increase my happiness next year. The obstacles between me and my personal upgrade are formidable, things like chocolate chip cookies, and how far away the gym seems on a cold morning.

I certainly think my kids would benefit from some well-thought-out resolutions (keeping their rooms clean, getting to bed on time, doing their homework neatly come to my mind). But as teenagers, they’re changing all the time, in spite of me and the other adults around them.

I make it hard for my children to grow and evolve into their next phase of being. I resist their mutations. They become stuck in my head a certain way and I’m unable to see the evidence of their transforming identities.

My younger daughter loved the color yellow when she was 3-years-old, maybe longer. Everything yellow — stuffed animals, food, paints. I found this wonderful and endearing. She called it “lellow,” which was so cute and made us all ask her if she wanted “lellow” candy or “lellow” clothes.

She’s 13 now, and “lellow” is not her favorite color anymore — but you wouldn’t know that from me, her mother and her grandmothers. We still look at her as if nothing has changed, in spite of the evidence: she is now taller than five feet and able to pronounce that color just fine, thank you very much. We still give her yellow clothes and bring her yellow toys. I can be alone in the house, saying “lellow” to the dog and, magically, it’s as if that little girl is in the room with me again. Read Complete Article Here.

Watching the documentary “Who Does She Think She Is?” struck a heart-chord with me as I witnessed so many of the women being interviewed in the film finding the tension between her role as mother and her role as artist.

When it comes down to it, many of the mothers that I know experience the pull between their creativity (whether it’s their art, their teaching, their business, their not-for-profit, their cooking; whatever their soul-centered work is) and their family life. This pull - visible or not, conscious or not - can be draining, stifling, shameful, confusing, and frustrating.

Let me explain a little more. What I have found, as I’ve worked with women who have been caught between their passion and their family, is that they are operating under powerful and embedded inner expectations – what I would call “have to”s, “should”s, and “need to”s – around what a “Mother” is supposed to be. These expectations are either spoken or unspoken rules and codes that circulate in society and are adopted as Truth, even if they don’t ring true for a particular woman. Some common expectations include:

-“A good mother SHOULD put her family and children above all else, even herself”

-“A good mother MUST spend most of her time tending to her children”

-“A good mother SHOULD feel totally fulfilled from her family life alone”

-“Creativity and soul-nourishing activities MUST BE separate from and less important than income-generating jobs”

Expectations like these might sound arcane, however they are still powerfully at play in many women’s (and men’s) lives, even if the family is modern, progressive, and feminist.

The result is that you feel guilty when you devote time to your passion; unfulfilled if you devote all your time to your family…and pretty tired either way.

The way to begin to turn around this guilt, misalignment, and frustration is to first get clear on all the ways you are operating under other people’s expectations, whether those other people are your own parents, your friends, your religion, your culture.

By Rahti Gorfien

There are a lot people in recent years who call themselves ‘goddesses’ walking around.  Which is kind of fun.  Burlesque goddesses, corporate goddesses, you-deserve-that-you’re-a-goddess-goddesses. 

But what if really, we’re all just, er…women.

Now, I hope I’m not about get my ass kicked here…although I probably am… what if all this goddess stuff is really just some mass inferiority parading as superiority complex?  It could be.  But that might not be a bad thing, and I’ll tell you why.

Goddess-embodying has roots in ancient matrilineal cultures, and so there’s some subversive energy at play here that I’m all for.  In ‘Who Does She think She is’, a wonderful documentary about women artists, Goddesses, particularly of the Eastern variety such as Kali, are the favored subject of one painter because she is inspired by their ruthlessness. 

Ruthlessness is a quality often required of anyone who intends to make art for a living.  In that sense the field shared by artists of any gender and women in the United States could be called even.  However, within that subset of the population women and especially mothers are as marginalized as anywhere else.  The Guerilla Girls, an artist/activist group launched in 1985, keep statistics such as the following in the public eye: currently only 4% of all work on exhibit at MOMA is by women.  Another woman in the film begins her career as an actress-singer well into motherhood and marriage, and that proves to be a deal-breaking game-changer ending in divorce.  For every woman in the film, a quality of quiet ruthlessness has been mandatory in order for them to survive as artists at all.  And so it makes sense that to simply attain a right-sized presence in the world, a mindset of amplified empowerment is needed, and goddessing certainly fits that bill.

But the goddess thing may be becoming passé, and that, I think, is a good thing too.  Because beyond that imagery is maturity, a state of knowing, accepting and championing of oneself.  At that point, the issue of ruthlessness or goddess-ness becomes moot as we settle into an identity of Self that includes all that we are; wife, mother, artist…but in no particular order.

The film struck a familiar chord for me, as it reflected back to me what has been the guiding force in my life: how to successfully combine a creative vocation with a meaningful family life.

I can see it all clearly now that I am on  the other side -in my fifties with a 21 year old daughter . Since I grew up in the 60’s and 70’s, in an Italian family where waiting on men was normal, the idea that it is unfair that women have to choose between career and family never really occurred to me. 

My response for a long time was thinking that having children was simply out of the question. I wanted to be an artist, which was  a very consuming life path. At 34, I decided life wouldn’t be complete without a child, so I ventured into that unknown territory called motherhood. Having my daughter helped me see life differently. In fact, I have no doubt that having her in my life has enhanced my creativity. Like the women in the film, my days revolved around taking care of my child’s needs and fitting my work around her. There were many late nights. I was constantly tired.

For many of us,  we are forced to juggle a number of realities: we have to earn money, we are compelled to express ourselves creatively and we want to be able to spend time with our children.  What I propose is this: even though we might not be able to pursue our passions full-time, we can keep the big picture in mind and take opportunities to move closer to our goals by keeping them in focus. Remember, it is not just a feminist issue here, we are also dealing with a society that demands results NOW, SUCCESS before 40.  As the book Art and Fear states, those who go on creating learn how not to stop.  No matter how difficult life gets, just keep the pursuit of your dreams going in some concrete way.