Right where we belong
Danielle Westman receives her participant certificate from Teresa Day at Minnesota Correctional Facility – Shakopee on May 10.
Kerem Yücel | MPR News
Like Bellis™, my daughter, Sarah, turned 40 this year. My family and I celebrated her birthday in May, just a couple weeks after the first Bellis anniversary celebration.
Also like Bellis, she is not the same as when she began in 1983. My sweet infant daughter learned and grew every day since then. From preschool to college and beyond, all her experiences and life events over these four decades shaped her into the mature and confident woman she is today. And she is right where she belongs in every way.
Bellis began in infancy to 12 Founding Mothers. That is not to say Adoption Option Committee, Inc., as it was known then, was helpless. Quite the opposite. From its beginning, support for birth mothers was paramount and constant.
In its “teen years,” Bellis branched out to share information in schools and in community organizations. Those experiences and lessons learned along the way guided our leaders in the growth. We learned what worked or didn’t, what was helpful or not, what changed in adoption that required Bellis to shift—without ever losing sight of our mission.
Like a grown child graduating from college with expanded and newfound knowledge, we adjusted and expanded programs. Ten years ago this year, we launched our birth mother retreats for women whose children are parented by others. The retreats are now a hallmark Bellis program that continues to serve and support birth mothers as our Founding Mothers intended. We recognize that many reasons can lead to others parenting their children, and each birth mother is worthy of a safe space to share her story without judgment.
Within our late 30s, we begin to recognize exactly where we need to be now. That is true for both my daughter and for Bellis.
My Sarah lives life now as a wife and a working mom of youngsters in a rural place that perfectly suits her and her young family. It looks little like where she was even 8 – 10 years ago.
Eight years ago in 2015, Bellis couldn’t have imagined that another group of marginalized mothers could benefit from the special care and support that Bellis grew into over 40 years. It feels like where we are today suits us, and we believe it would suit our Founding Mothers as well.
We are right where we belong given all that we have learned over 40 years. Our expertise evolved, layer by layer, as we recognized the power of the peer-to-peer support that is central to our Stronger Together™ programming. That empowered our leaders in April 2021 to take our work to a space nobody else wanted to be: providing grief support for mothers whose legal parental rights were terminated by the courts.
In the last two years, we have seen rapid growth of our grief-support program.Our fastest growing program, it now offers four weekly group meetings, including the one in the prison that this MPR News story features.
You can be part of this powerful work. There are two ways you can help today, right now.
Share this blog or the URL below for the MPR story, and our social media posts about it, with your network of friends, family and colleagues who support compassion for marginalized groups.
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2023/05/30/at-shakopee-prison-women-grieve-lost-children-work-toward-redemptionIf you believe, as we do, in this work to support women who grieve the ambiguous loss of terminated parental rights, now is the time to invest so our work can reach more women.
By Linda McDonald, Bellis Marketing & Development Director