What if it were possible to know that you have everything you need to parent this beautiful family you have? Everything, including a community.

May is National Foster Care Month, a time of thanks for our nation’s foster care system and prayer for the 415,000 children in foster care in the US today. Who are these children and who are the many people committed to caring for them every day?

Being part of the foster care system requires love and courage. Read on.

Many of our adopted and fostered children are ‘kids from hard places’. Kids whose early years were full of instability, food scarcity, inconsistent even unsafe living environments, unhealthy competition, and spotty or conditional love, at best. A tough way to be introduced to love and trust…. Right? Not fair but their reality. And they are now ours and we are glad. They are in homes with stability, food, safety, unconditional love, and an abundant future despite the current crisis. Imperfect but healthy and loving places.

Daunting thought isn’t it.

The good, enriching, loving relationships are easy to claim as ‘what we want’. Tougher are those we struggle with. Those with a strong emotional connection that are a bit off-kilter at best and painful in their worst. How can it be possible that those too are relationships we ‘want’? In our hearts don’t we see something different, better?

I invite you into a conversation about adoption and coaching, both powerful and both contribute to our world in a very positive way. I am the adoptive Mom of two twenty-something young men. While I am here to tell you that adoption is powerful, I am also here to broaden that view and bring coaching into a partnership to ensure parents and children build the strong, long term relationships both desire. Parenting is wonderful and not for the faint of heart. Raising adopted children can take that a level deeper.