Roadblock or Detour

Roadblock or Detour

Mar 21

Let me assure you off the top that this post is in no way related to The Amazing Race.  Rather, it relates to the other amazing journey we’re on right now… adoption.

We recently heard back from CAS regarding our case and were happy to meet with someone from their staff.  Unfortunately, the news was not what we were hoping to hear.  Seems CAS has a fair backlog of families waiting for children, so they’re not looking to add to that at this time, which could essentially end our journey with them at the moment.

Now this isn’t all bad news. The reason for this backlog of families waiting to adopt is that more and more of the adoptable children are being adopted by their extended families, and not being sent to live with strangers.  This is excellent news for the children, if a bit disappointing for us.

It also doesn’t seem to jive with the stat I’ve seen quoted in a few places that there are 30,000 children across Canada, ready and waiting to be adopted.  If I do the math, that number is about 1/1000th of the population of Canada.  And if there are 1,000,000 people in the greater Ottawa area, then that means there should be about 1000 of those kids here in the Ottawa area. Now, since children age out of the adoption system at 16 — which is a whole different topic — and we’re only able to adopt a child up to 4 years of age, assuming a fairly even age distibution, that should mean that about 240 kids would be in our target age range within the city of Ottawa.* So why then are there 40+ approved families waiting for a child match to become available and we’re not even getting put on the list? Good question, but not one I’m likely to know the answer to anytime soon.

At the heart of all this, we keep coming back to the question — will this be a roadblock, or a detour? While the door for adoption through CAS Ottawa has been closed for now, we have certainly been given a plethora of alternate routes. So will we take one of them, or will we stop here and throw up the white flag? Okay, so anyone who knows us should know that giving up isn’t an option! But then, which of the many other routes available will we take?

Do we go for the private adoption route? What about international adoption? Or foster care — there is apparently a great need for that in the city. In the end, it comes down to asking some tough questions about our motivations and learning that we, too are selfish jerks, as Adrian so elequently put it.

So, we shall now explore some of the other paths that lead — we hope — towards growing our family through adoption, and turn this roadblock into a detour. Hopefully, it’s there’s some nice scenery along the way!

* I realize I’ve used some fairly rounded off numbers here, but the purpose was to illustrate a point, not develop a new mathematical proof for adoption age finding.