Well, as I thought about what to fill this page with for our first blog of a new year, I found myself hesitant, unsure how to unpack all this year was, while still processing all the ways it’s affected me and our community.
But this last year was…. Rough. It was a season of revealing and reprioritizing. A year of learning and unlearning, breaking down and building back up. For me personally, a year of introspection and sitting and shifting through much more pain than this seven on the enneagram usually cares to do.
I remember at the beginning of 2020 feeling this pull to create more spaces for us in the triad to come together. I envisioned us coming out from behind our screens, and sitting around the table together, having meaningful conversations with our voices instead of with our keyboards. I thought we would have done multiple retreats this year, across different locations in the US, and I thought right now we would be celebrating that we had our very first conference.
HA.
Gathering together, despite my best wishes, was not what 2020 had in store for us.
This year hit all of us in different ways when a pandemic hit and we all had to pivot. I found my hours to work on Kindred disappear as my kids’ school closed and I became a full time teacher, 4-year-old entertainer, house cleaner (Who am I kidding, my partner Josh does most of that…), and entrepreneur. I was with my kids a whole lot while my husband continued his third year of Residency. As the days of the pandemic went by, I started feeling less and less like myself. I realized how much of my energy and joy I get from being around people (and OUT of my house.) I watched people and leaders and entrepreneurs around me make new solutions for their businesses. Coming up with new creative ideas and cranking out, what looked like to me, more content than ever before. But this was not me. I lacked creativity, energy, and unfortunately, I can count on my fingers the number of days I got dressed that didn’t include leisure wear and no bra.
I felt like my team did much more carrying of me than I did of them. Thank God for friends that row your boat when you have no energy to get back to shore.
But this year we each did our best. And that looked different for each of us.
We watched as our world crumbled in many ways. This year was just not just an unveiling in our personal lives, but it continues to expose the ugly undercurrents that have a stronghold on this country rooted in racism, white supremacy, white power and privledge that has been building and showing it’s face for centuries. We heard cries for justice as new names were forever engraved on our hearts…Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Walter Wallace Jr, Jake Blake… and the list goes on and on.
I recognize that any personal discomfort or pain that I experienced this year shades in comparison to the pain that my Black friends and neighbors of color have experienced continually.
Together we watched as more adoptee and birth mom voices than ever raised up in our community. We listened as adoptees spent their emotional energy to educate us on what it is like to grow up as an adoptee, and how our choices now, as adoptive parents, will affect our children as they grow. We listened to birth moms that have felt under included, and taken advantage of. We lamented as we heard more stories of trafficking and coercion in adoption be exposed.
My hope is that these stories and realities transformed us – and that we will never be the same.
But as hard as this year was – there are some things worth celebrating:
- We hosted our first Triad conference in Palm Springs. This retreat was life giving and life changing and I look forward to having more of you experience it.
- We made new commitments to continue to center and lift up marginalized voices in our community
- We restructured how we pay our team and guest bloggers – making sure that adoptees and birth moms get paid more than adoptive parents
- We worked with over 87 clients to create a profile books that includes powerful education from a birth mom perspective
- We published 42 blogs written by all sides of the triad
- We started Kindred Conversations as a place to be educated and hear stories from all sides of the triad and we were thrilled to welcome Angela Tucker as our first guest
- Hosted our first triad coffee hour for each side of the triad
While I am proud of those things – The things that mean the most to me are the things that we will never be able to qualify.
Like how many:
- Relationships were built
- People felt less alone
- Adoptive parents fought for their children’s birth family
- People reconsidered if adoption is actual the best option for their family
- People fought to keep families together
- Adoptive parents made changes to the ways they parent or support their adoptee
- Open adoptions happened that might not have without education and storytelling
- Committed to a life of anti-rasicm work
- People were transformed by listening to the voices of adoptees and birth moms they found in our space
- Adoptive parents changed course to fight for a more ethical adoption
- People felt loved and heard and supported through this community
Throughout this year the vision of who I want Kindred to be continues to come a little more in focus – This place is all about relationships. My hope in this place is that you find people to go through this journey with – whether on your side of the triad or another – that you find people that will challenge you, that will celebrate with you, and that will row your boat when you just can’t do it anymore.
My hope is that the stories that we hear in this place will connect us. That we will be united by our shared humanity first before our label in the triad. My hope is that the relationships that you form here and the knowledge that you carry away from this space will be transformed into action and spill out in our personal lives, making an impact on the generations to come.
Maybe we grew more together while we were apart, then we could have being together. And maybe that’s just what we needed as a foundation to this new year.
WRITTEN BY HANNAH ELOGE, FOUNDER KINDRED + CO.
Hannah lives in Chicago, but she is a desert girl at heart, with her husband, twin girls, Ezra + Olive, and their winsome goldendoodle, Hadley. She loves queso dip a little too much. A photographer, designer, and creative, Hannah is passionate about a larger adoption conversation that involves all sides of the triad. She started Kindred + Co. to form a community where stories of both the beauty and brokenness of adoption can be shared.
