I know a little girl. She lives in a residential care setting that is part hospital and part group home. You see this little girl is what they call “medically fragile”. That means she has a multitude of disabilities and health conditions that make her life ever more fragile than say my own or perhaps yours. Sometimes they call her “complex special needs”. She can not move without enormous help. She can not speak at least in any language most would understand. She needs help with food and when food leaves her. Yes I can see why they call her “complex”.
Yet this isn’t really the girl I know. This little girl has personality. This little girl has a voice. This is a little girl who quite ably lets those around her know when she is upset. She can cry with the best of them and express her anger and annoyance quite clearly. More so she lets the world know when she is happy. Like when her Mother and Sister visit her. This little girl lights the room with her smile and fills the room with the sound of joy. She relishes the time when her Mom reads her favorite books to her. The touch of her sister is like flipping a switch , turning on a bright hope and energy. That is how I choose to know this little girl.
This little girl is a person. “Medically fragile” , “complex special needs” are merely descriptions that work for systems. They are not her.
I came to know this little girl because her Mom reached out to me. This little girl was in a hospital and it looked like she could not return to live in her home because the “home care” and other resources to support her at home could not be found. The supports needed could be conceived of. The supports needed did exist but there was no money for them.
The local Childrens Aid Society was called.
So the little girl waited in the hospital. More accurately she “languished” in hospital. She was not a happy camper. Her Mother needless to say was very upset. This was all exacerbated when the Children’s Aid Society placed the little girl in care, and moved her to a “complex special needs” institution hundreds of kilometers from where her Mom and Sister lived. You don’t have to be Fellini to figure out how this went.
When her Mom made the trek, numerous times, hundreds of kilometers, to visit her daughter she noticed the health of her daughter deteriorating. She might ask questions and make suggestions about what might work to improve her daughter’s health and experience at the institution. Always respectfully, but with the extensive knowledge of her daughter that was gained from 13 years of caring for and loving her. Guess what? Now her Mom was deemed “complex” herself and worse. Instead of understanding her Mom as incredibly loving, her Mom was now understood by the instritution as a “pain in the neck”.
Make no mistake the way we understand things is a choice. The way the Childrens Aid Society understood the little girl’s Mom was a choice. A destructive, unfortunate, even tragic choice played out when the Childrens Aid Society went to court to bring the little girl into care.
More than a year later the little girl lives in a hospital bed in an institution with visits by her Mom and Sister as frequently as the institution will allow. The little girl’s professional caregivers will not speak to the Mom when she visits. It has become an incredibly bizarre situation.
The situation and actions of the CAS are before the courts. The case has yet to be heard . For over a year. Still waiting just like the little girl. But of course the little girl has fewer days she can wait than the court has to hear the case.
I can write so much more but let me get to the point. This “situation” needs to be resolved. And it needs to be resolved now. This situation is wrong. Utterly, completely wrong. It is a situation in which the Ministry, the Office of the Children’s lawyer, the Minister’s Office can intervene to find resolution. It is not a case about child protection but about human relations gone awry.
Beyond that call to action let me write that while the plight of the little girl I know is bizzare, in so many ways, it is a shared experience with so many other children deemed “complex”. Those children whose parents have been presented with the horrific choice of giving up custody of their child to the child protection system because there were not supports available to support their child at home. Children with loving caring parents who fight to keep their child at home with them. The parents then becoming “problematic” and having their child apprehended because, well in my opinion. they love their child too fiercely.
In 2005, then Ombudsman, Andre Marin, who was known for speaking out, published the seminal report “Between A Rock And A Hard Place”. Almost 20 years later nothing for children has changed. In fact things have become worse due to emerging need and cruel reductions of service. It is a government manufactured tragedy.
This is my second call to action in this piece. Government fix this. Now. No laundry list citing what has been done or how much has been spent that has only left our children suffering. Fix this. Lets bring together parents with service providers and bureaucrats force them to be laser focused on children and build something new. Im in.
Let’s legislate the conditions in which love can flourish.