Daily Prompt Love <3 Not Alone
16 October 2017
Make art about realizing you’re not alone.
Posts tagged ‘writing for women’
Daily Prompt Love <3 Assault
15 October 2017
Make art about assault, about experiencing assault, about surviving being assaulted.
Daily Prompt Love <3 Another Time
25 May 2017
Been reading and thinking a lot lately about vintage sewing, about work done by hands in the countless generations before me.
Make art about feeling connected to something from another era, another time. Reveal this connection through a specific daily process or specific object.
Daily Prompt Catch-Up <3 Attempting Peace in the Tumult
20 May 2017
Sewing without a pattern, a night gown I’ve wanted to attempt for months, but kept scaring myself out of trying.
Make art about attempting something you’ve been scared to try.
21 May 2017
Make art about making moments of peace among the tumult.
Daily Prompt Love <3 Another Chance: A Very Special Birthday Prompt
19 May 2017
Seven years ago today, my oldest son J was in a terrible car accident, his little plastic Saturn sedan t-boned by a brand new Dodge Charger with its all-steel construction.
J, my laughing, charismatic, kind, smart son, only 22 then, was critically injured, with a compression skull fracture, subdural hematoma, subarachnoid hemorrhaging, and four feather bleeds into his beautiful brain. They airlifted him by helicopter from our small town to the major medical facility, MCV, in Richmond, admitting him directly into the neurological ICU. He was conscious the whole time, talking, joking, charming the nurses, complaining that he couldn’t look out the window on his first-ever helicopter ride, even saying things meant to reassure me, his sister, his brother, the friends who stood by us at the hospital. We bedded down in the ICU waiting room, while behind those heavy doors, monitors clicked and hummed, documenting my son’s traumatic brain injury. That was Wednesday.
Early Thursday afternoon, as I stood as J’s bedside, a doctor we hadn’t seen before strode in, his crisp white lab coat flowing behind him. He introduced himself as the head of neurological research, and after a moment, he asked us if we had seen J’s latest CT scan. We hadn’t, so he hurried from the room, telling us he’d be right back. J and I looked at each other, confused, and my son must have seen worry in my eyes, as he patted my hand.
The doctor returned, wheeling in a large piece of equipment, a medical imaging viewer, and positioned it at the end of J’s ICU bed. He turned it on and the image of my son’s skull appeared, stark in the black and whiteness of it all. For a second, we were completely silent. Then the doctor, smiling, began to explain what we were seeing.
What we were seeing was nothing: no bleeding, no bruising, no swelling. The only sign that remained of my son’s injury just 24 hours before was the spiderweb of fractures in the bone, as if a pencil eraser had been pushed into the fragile shell of an egg, a network of bone break just beneath the C-shaped wound on the side of his head. J’s brain looked completely normal, showing not a single other sign of the blow he’d taken the day before in the wreck that had left his little car mangled, left nothing but the driver’s seat intact.
The doctor grinned, saying, “We want to study you, study why and how you healed so quickly.”
That was Thursday. We brought J home midday on Friday. Six weeks later, he was back at work, then back to his last year of college that fall. We talked time and again about his miraculous healing, about why it might have happened.
J, my wise son, said, “Mom, I don’t know why it happened. I just know I got another chance.”
He now calls May 19 his birthday. His Facebook status this morning read, “Today, I am alive.”
Make art about being given another chance.
Daily Prompt Love <3 Progress
16 May 2017
No one’s perfect.
Make art about progress versus perfection, about the myth of perfection, about the lessons and the beauty of being flawed.
Daily Prompt Catch-Up <3 Wind, and Grace, and Hypocrisy
5 May 2017
Make art about what’s carried on the wind.
6 May 2017
Make art about being in the presence of Grace.
7 May 2017
Make art about hypocrisy.
Daily Prompt Love <3 Shame
1 May 2017
Read a story this morning about lunchrooms shaming poor children.
I cried for an hour. The scars of shame run so deep, follow us into adulthood, undermine the beauty and power of who we are at every turn, if it’s not healed.
“I look in the mirror through the eyes of the child that was me.”― Judy Collins
Make art about childhood shame, about seeing that hurt child in your adult eyes, about healing shame.
Mary Carroll-Hackett: Poetry and Prose 
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