Today it was a blessing to see hundreds....hmm...maybe thousands....well, I'm not exactly sure how many people, but A LOT of people: adoptive parents, foster parents, social workers, caregivers, respite providers, mental health professionals, adoption professionals, concerned friends, and many others come together to become refreshed on this sometimes very long and lonely journey through adoption and foster care.
I was able to facilitate two workshops today. There were many workshops going on at the same time and my first workshop was during a lunch break, so I really didn't expect a big turn out. The topic was Raising Challenging Teens. This is a topic I am passionate about not only as a parent of 6 teenagers (and 2 that are now even beyond the teen years), but also because over the years I have been involved in presenting valuable tools and resources to families through various formats such as trust based parenting, but the question always comes back to "What about teens?" "How do we apply these tools and resources to teens"? There are simply not enough resources for parenting thru the teen years with the added elements of adoption/abandonment/loss/grief, etc...
The workshop was full and unfortunately some people were turned away. I have received emails asking me if the session was recorded, but unfortunately it was not. Contact me though and I can try to send you the powerpoint at least.
The second workshop was on Therapeutic Parenting. This is also a topic you could literally just touch the surface with after three to four hours, but in a one hour session, we basically just covered seven strategies very briefly. Maybe tomorrow I will try to do a blogpost on each of these topics since the room was full and there were also many amazing sessions going on simultaneously.
Bottom line though, people need support! I am very proud to be an adoptive parent of many amazing children through the miracle of international adoption, domestic adoption, and embryo adoption, but it is HARD. We have done all the wrong things according to good social work practice: altered birth order, artificially twinned (triplets, quadruplets), adopted more then one child in a year, and on and on. There are valid reasons why doing these things are not always a very good idea. It has been brutal at times. It is not an easy road, but I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that God is BIGGER then all of the messy details.
For those of you on this long and bumpy road, hang in there! You are not alone! There was a scripture that was presented today that spoke to me "Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is demon-possessed and suffering terribly." Matthew 15:22 NIV
Yikes! Have you ever seen a person that appears demon possessed? I certainly have and I know many clients will describe the same thing to me. Literally your child goes away and someone or something else entirely comes out. It is scary, disturbing, unsettling, and incredibly sad.
The take away from the scripture today was that the woman prayed "Have mercy on ME". The caregiver was struggling. It's not just have mercy on the child. Yes, the trauma our kids have faced is often horrific, but the secondary trauma that we face as parents is also very significant. The pain that we feel for our kids from hard places is real. The pain that is often inflicted upon us is also very real. We cannot "fix" the situation. There will be times where we have exhausted all our resources and we barely have the energy to even pray. But take heart. Do not underestimate the impact we have even when we feel like a complete failure. The Lord knows our shortcoming and has it all covered.
"Be confident that you can make a difference. Don't get overwhelmed.....Try to take each day and each task as they come, breaking them down into manageable pieces for action while struggling to see the whole. And don't think you have to "win" immediately - or even at all - to make a difference"
~Marian Wright Edelman
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