On Feeling Known

I spent this weekend at an Empowered to Connect conference (sponsored by Show Hope).

Let me just say if you are a foster or adoptive parent, you have to go to one of these.

Seriously.

Find one.  Register.  Do it.

I had grand plans of writing about each of the sessions and what I learned.

Alas, I am an introvert and being with people all day (even the most wonderful people in the world) exhausts me.  So I went back to my hotel room, brewed a cup of decaf and flipped through mindless magazines.  I breathed deeply.  I rested.

But this is what I know.

For two days, surrounded by 700 of my closest friends,

I felt known.

Together we laughed.  We cried.  We shared stuff that only our nearest and dearest know.  We joked about stuff that if anybody else went there, we would be on the defensive so fast it’s not even funny.

Because when we did, heads nodded.  Amens resounded.  For the love of all that is good, someone got it.  Someone understood.  Someone could yell from the rafters, “me too.”

I have a tiny pocket like this in my real life.  Mostly people who are relentlessly loyal to me and my daughter and my foster babies and who have worked really hard to understand.  To get it.

I have a slightly bigger pocket online—foster and adoptive mama bloggers whose words resonate in my soul because, deep down, they could be mine.

But to sit in a (really big) room, surrounded by real, live flesh and blood people with big hearts and thick skin, with fierce devotion to their kids and a very real understanding that, despite what everyone else seems to think, love is not enough?

That’s powerful.

Like crazy powerful, people.

All this to say

Friends, you are not alone.

Find your people.

Be known.

And sign up for an Empowered to Connect conference.

For real.