I’m launching a business! What?!?!

I know, I know, I can’t even believe it. But today, which is also the first day of National Adoption Awareness Month, my business is live, and I can’t wait to share all about my journey leading up to today.

The Beginning

I’ll start at the beginning: adoption is trauma, and often a child goes through trauma before the trauma of adoption. I did. But I didn’t understand this trauma, and that I even had it, until I started going to therapy. There I was able to unpack my roots of trauma, and where my anxiety stems from. It’s a deep, dark black hole, digging into one’s adoption. It’s one that you have to go all the way in with both feet, if you are to come out the other end, which is where your healing journey begins. And that healing journey has crucial people in it, who validated my feelings as an adoptee, who helped me better understand and unpack my trauma, and who encouraged me to just keep going, and that it would get better.

What I Wanted to Be When I Grew Up

I never really knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. I’ve written about it here before, but up until a few months ago, I was still confused as to what the heck I was supposed to do with my life. And then a series of events led to this business launch, and I know this is exactly what I’m supposed to do.

I started an Instagram account shortly after I started this blog, in April of 2021. It was my daughter’s birthday, and even though I had wanted to start an account on Instagram before, the turmoil of all I was feeling on my daughter’s birthday, pushed me over the edge. I created the Instagram account with the intent just to share my story, and by sharing hopefully be able to process it myself better, and maybe help a few people along the way. Boy did I underestimate what God would do through me!

It All Started With An Instagram Account

A few months after I had created my Instagram account, I had become connected to the whole adoption/ foster care community there. Never before had I found fellow adoptees who were struggling with similar things as me. Never before had I seen foster and adoptive parents wanting to learn how to better parent the children in their care. And never before had my words been so validated, so needed, and so healing to others. It wasn’t long before both adoptive and foster parents, people interested in adoption and foster care, and fellow adoptees were overwhelming my private messages with questions they wanted my view on. As life giving it was to be able to help, I simply couldn’t keep up, and so I stopped responding.

But a few days later, I realized coming alongside people and helping them by providing my unique perspective and experience is exactly what lit a fire in me, and that sharing the hope I have through Jesus as I shared my story was exactly the work God has sent me to do. But I knew I couldn’t answer all these questions, at least not with the quality of answer I wanted to. And so, I started praying and dreaming up a business.

Praying Up a Business

Around this time, a fellow military spouse reached out to me and offered her help in creating me a website. Originally it just for this blog, but I knew it was the chance God wanted me to take of launching the business I had been crafting up. It’s been a few months now of building my website and learning all sorts of new things, and absolutely loving every moment of it. Never before have I felt so alive, and so confident in my calling as I do now.

So here it is!! Let me introduce Mercy and Healing LLC! https://mercyandhealing.com/

What exactly is it I’ll be doing, and what is Mercy and Healing LLC?

Love Hopes All Things

1 Corinthians 13: 4-7
Love is patient, love is kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

These verses kept coming to my mind as I prayed forth my business. And so, I am officially an Adoption Coach for foster and adoptive parents, and Advocate for foster and adoptive youth. My goal is to come alongside families affected by foster care and/ or adoption and give them an inside perspective of what their child may be going through. I want to inspire them to love their kids as explained in the verses above, but not only their kids but their kids’ biological families this way and social workers this way and everyone who is in this system full of ugliness and brokenness this way. This is how I strive to love my clients and pour into them, so they can love and pour into the people in their systems in the same way.

Together, through sharing my perspective and education as an adoptee, with foster and adoptive families, we can bear all things, believe in all things, hope in all things, and endure all things.

How You Can Help

My prayer for this business is that God uses me and my story, the good and the bad, to love others well, and to help them better understand all the nuances of foster care and adoption, from the perspective of the very child at the center of them. Share my website and services with others. Foster care and adoption affects so many more people than we think. You never know how your sharing can give one more person hope, one more person clarity, and allow one more child to be better understood and cared for. Because through understanding and caring, comes mercy and healing…