A Few Days a Year, Nobody Asks Me to Explain
Every fall, I pack cases with pop-up displays, books, and a tablecloth with our logo on it. Then I drive or fly to a conference so large it fills an entire building, packed with strangers who already understand why I’m there.
I don’t have to explain why we took in kids who weren’t ours. I don’t have to defend the decision to a relative who thinks we took on too much, or reassure a coworker who asks if it’s “hard on our real kids.” I don’t have to translate what a home study is, or why a teenager might test us before she trusts us, or why a stepdaughter might need a year before she calls me anything at all. At CAFO Summit and the handful of gatherings like it, everyone in the building already knows.
I didn’t expect that to matter as much as it does. I thought the value of these conferences was the content: the workshops, the new research, the chance to hear what other organizations are doing. The content does matter. But the thing I actually found is simpler. For a few days, I don’t have to explain myself to anyone.
The difference between support and understanding
I’ve written before about building a support network of the friends, family, and respite providers who show up when you need them. That kind of support is real and necessary. But it’s not the same thing as being surrounded by people who share the specific calling you have.
A friend can bring you a casserole when you’re exhausted. She can watch your kids so you can get a break. She cannot always sit with you when you realize your foster son flinches at raised voices because of what happened before he came to you, or when your stepson tells you, calmly and without malice, that you’ll never really be his mom. She loves you. She still needs the situation explained to her before she can respond to it. At a gathering like CAFO, nobody needs it explained. They’ve lived some version of it themselves.
That’s a different kind of relief than general support. General support carries you through a hard week. Being surrounded by people who share your specific challenge does something else. It tells you that what you’re doing isn’t strange, isn’t excessive, and isn’t a mistake, even on the days it feels like all three.
I go to two conferences like this every year, one in the fall and one in the spring. CAFO is the fall one. Neither gets old. Each time, the same thing happens. I walk in tired from the drive and the setup, and I walk out tired in a completely different way, lighter instead of heavier, because I spent three days around people who didn’t need anything explained to them first.
What this looks like for blended families too
CAFO Summit is built mainly around foster care, adoption, and orphan care, and I don’t want to overstate how directly it speaks to stepparents. But the underlying need is the same, and stepfamilies have their own versions of it.
I know stepparents who found this same relief at a weekend marriage retreat built specifically for blended families, where nobody blinked when they described the strange arithmetic of loving a child who has two other parents already, or the exhaustion of enforcing house rules for a stepchild who spends every rule violation reminding you that you’re not really in charge. I know others who found it in a smaller way, in a single friend who is also raising a blended family and who doesn’t need the situation explained before she understands it. The scale is different. The need underneath it isn’t.
If you’re a stepparent reading this and thinking CAFO isn’t really built for you, you’re not wrong. But the thing CAFO gives foster and adoptive parents, a room full of people who don’t require an explanation first, is worth seeking out in whatever form exists for your specific family. It might be smaller. It still counts.
Why this is worth the effort to find
Finding your specific people takes more effort than accepting help from whoever’s nearby. You may have to travel for it, like I do twice a year. You may have to seek out an online group instead of an in-person one, if nothing near you fits. You may have to try a few before you find the ones who actually understand your particular situation rather than a version of it. It’s real work, on top of the work you’re already doing at home.
Unfortunately, that effort is not optional. It’s part of how you last in this reality. Plan B parenting, whether it’s foster care, adoption, or blended-family life, asks you to explain yourself constantly, to schools, to extended family, and to well-meaning strangers who ask questions they’d never ask a biological parent. Finding a place where you don’t have to do that, even for a few days a year, isn’t a luxury. It’s part of what keeps you steady enough to keep going.
I go home from CAFO every year tired in the specific way conferences make you tired, and lighter in a way I didn’t expect the first time it happened. I’m not facing any challenges I wasn’t carrying before. I’m just dealing with my reality around people who already understand the challenge.
Want to go deeper? Our self-directed course, Being the People Who Are Not Supposed to Be There, covers the particular identity challenges of foster, adoptive, and stepparenting, and how to hold onto your sense of self while filling a role no one prepared you for.
