It is time to take our journey a bit deeper. Today I am writing about something personal.
Alongside my careers in communications, in business development and eventually the past decade as an entrepreneur, I have had an entirely separate side career, or more like the primary career. See, I am a foster mom to two beautiful, amazing and gifted children. These siblings arrived in our lives when they were only 13 and 4 months old, babies really.
As we became trained foster parents, we were given a pile of papers, maybe 20-30 documents in a stack. In that stack of documents was listed all the children waiting to find a home.
I remember sitting in a car with our family members, returning from the "family day" in the foster parent training to help our closer relatives understand what it was, that we were actually going to do. I was leaning my head against the cold car window and tried not to hear the conversation taking place as they were going through the paper stack. I couldn't even look at that let alone listen to the conversation. I knew my child will be in that stack of papers, but how am I to choose a child based on her name, age and a short paragraph about the devastation her young life had been thus far?
What if I can't find the right one? What if I choose the wrong one? What if I want someone and it doesn't work out? What if they are all from such difficult beginnings, that I don't dare to take anyone?
It took me three days to sit down to read the papers. I turned the page after page, and my heart was hurting reading these stories. Older kids, younger kids, toddlers all without a loving home. Some kids had been waiting for a home for years.
I began to read a page which said a girl, 12 months, the mother is pregnant with the sibling, her expected labour is in May. My heart went THUMP TA THUMP TA THUMP, and I literally yelled to my husband we are having two kids, not just one.
The moment with such clarity that there was no question in my mind whether those two were meant to be my children or not. I knew that immediately without a shadow of a doubt.
From there began a journey of scrutiny with the social workers investigating our lives if, in fact, we had what it takes to take two special needs children at once. The conviction and belief I had about that were unwavering. There was no doubt in my mind. None. And I fought for it. Hard. With everything I got. I prepared to get them both without knowing what was going to happen. I bought two beds, two car seats clothes for a boy and a girl. All of it was done in the manner, that they are both arriving at the same moment.
We only learned that both of them are arriving at the same time when we walked into their room in the children's home and saw two black waste bags packed with their earthly possessions. Talk about 11th hour miracles.
We had won the exhausting battle or in other words - we had just completed a successful manifesting process. :)
Since then there have been numerous wins. All the losses I have taken as learning curves, never failures. When I have known where to go, that white heat begins to burn inside me, and I will not stop until I have gotten what I have set out to do.
The very second that baby boy was laid in my arms, he was mine, the love was mutual from the moment we got together. However, as the coming years would teach me, I had to earn the love of my daughter.
(Just so that you know, typically my fingers fly on the keyboard, today they seem to take their time.)
When I think about how their lives began, it shakes me to the core how in a country like Finland an underaged girl can give birth to not one, but two babies in less than a year. That means these young parents were wholly and entirely let down by the system. What makes it so bittersweet is, that as a result, I, the barren woman, had an opportunity to experience something that was out of reach for me - motherhood.
Three days before my son's first birthday, he was diagnosed with Diplegia Spastica, motoric handicap called Cerebral Palsy. That sent me to yet another crusade of multiple years. He spent a lot of time in a wheelchair when he was a little kid, but today he is a walking boy, well more like a young man really.
The unfolding of our lives to this date since I began the journey with my then boyfriend now my husband of 27 years, back in 1986 when I was a 14-year-old girl is nothing short of miraculous. The journey has been far from perfect. So many times I have lost my way, but there has always been this strong presence of guidance in my life to pull me back on track.
Right people show up at the right time to say the right words. It was a friend asking what the hell do I think I am doing and pulled my shit together for me, it was an old boss securing my job, so I dare to jump to the next one. It was my mama on the phone telling me to keep going, a support net of hospital professionals so tight to hold me when I had no strength left. It was a husband who loved me so much to forgive me unforgivable things.
Once it was a young mother paying the highest price any mother is asked to pay; to lose her children, to make me a mother.
None of that I take for granted. The gratitude I feel just by writing about this takes my breath away.
The reason I am writing this to you today is that I feel the presence of that guidance again. The calling on my life is changing again, and I feel the white heat rising to take me to my next journey.
I believe in living your life on purpose. With intention. Not just floating around, but actually intentionally creating and leading the life meant for you, not just the one you think you are expected to live.
So whatever you think that your purpose in life is, you don't know the half of it and neither does people around you.
Your purpose is far more significant, that you have ever even considered for yourself. It is calling that only you can answer. Beginning a journey to discover what that is for you, is the best gift you can give yourself today.
You may want to start by booking a call with me.
Much love,
Mari
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