The Journey Home: Why I'm Pursuing Adoption

As a travel advisor, I spend a lot of time thinking about journeys, how they start, where they take us, and who we become along the way. The best ones rarely follow the itinerary we planned. They detour. They surprise us. They crack us open and rebuild us into someone a little braver than the person we were at the departure gate.

This past year, I took a journey I never put on a map.

Ten Months

Last year, I had the profound privilege of becoming a foster mother. She came to me as a newborn, straight from the NICU, tiny, fragile, and mine to love for as long as she was with me. I brought her home from the hospital. I learned her cries. I memorized the exact way she curled her fingers around mine.

For ten months, I got to witness the kind of everyday magic that parents describe and the rest of us only imagine: the first smile, the first laugh, the first time she rolled over and looked at me like she'd just discovered gravity. I watched her grow. I watched her thrive. I was, for that season, her whole world, and she was mine.

The Part That Still Aches

She reunified with her biological father.

I want to be careful here, because this isn't a space for bitterness. But I also won't pretend the story was simple. The bar for reunification, in her case, was the bare minimum. I don't believe the system, the state, the guardian ad litem, the people tasked with advocating for her, acted in her best interest. That's a hard sentence to write, and an even harder one to live with.

If you've ever loved a child who wasn't legally yours, you know this particular shape of grief. It doesn't have a funeral. It doesn't come with casseroles. It just sits in the empty space where a bedtime routine used to be.

Choosing the Next Step

For a few months afterward, I sat with a question: Do I foster again, or do I pursue adoption?

Both paths lead to love. Both paths matter. Fostering is sacred work, and I will always have deep respect for the families who keep showing up, again and again, knowing their hearts might break. Some of them are called to that. For a season, I was too.

But as I listened, really listened, to what was pulling at me, I felt myself being drawn somewhere else. Toward permanence. Toward a child who would be mine, and who would know, from the beginning, that this is home. For good. Forever.

That pull didn't feel like running away from fostering. It felt like walking toward adoption.

Why I'm Sharing This, and Why I Became a Fora Advisor

Private adoption is expensive. Beautifully, life-changingly worth it, and expensive. Anyone who has walked this road knows the numbers can feel staggering, especially as a single parent by choice funding the journey on her own.

That's where Fora comes in.

Becoming a Fora travel advisor wasn't a random career pivot. It was a deliberate choice to turn something I already love, planning trips, curating stays, helping people build the kind of travel memories that become family lore, into a way to help bring my own child home. Every client I book, every honeymoon I plan, every family vacation I help pull together is a small, concrete step toward the nursery down the hall.

So when you book a trip with me, you're getting a travel advisor who genuinely cares about the details: the boutique hotel that's actually worth it, the upgrade you didn't know to ask for, the restaurant reservation that makes the whole trip. You're also, quietly, helping write the next chapter of someone else's story. Mine. And eventually, a little one who doesn't exist in my life yet but already exists in my heart.

I don't take that lightly, and I won't pretend it's a small thing. It's everything.

If You're On a Similar Road

If you're fostering, adopting, grieving a reunification, or quietly wondering if you're brave enough to start, I see you. Keep going. It's hard. It's worth it.

And if you're planning a trip, whether it's a honeymoon in Sorrento, a milestone birthday somewhere with great pasta, or the family vacation you've been putting off for three years, I would be honored to help you plan it. 🤍