Aleisha Deece-Cassidy is alternately thoughtful and giggly, which is to say that she is a 14-year-old girl, the lively kind who loves Twilight and those online quizzes that help you figure out what kind of person you are. Even though, in fact, Aleisha already knows. “I’m a full-on girlie girl,” she warns, opening the door to her bedroom, which is three different shades of pink, with stencils of Marilyn Monroe on the walls and stuffed animals fanned out just so on the bed. Not surprisingly, Aleisha also has a keen interest in face potions and makeup. “I think it comes from my mom, wanting to be pretty,” she muses.
What? Her mother, Lexi Deece-Cassidy, is puttering around their gleaming kitchen with a baseball cap jammed on her head, giving every indication of being a woman with more important things to think about than her looks. Aleisha clarifies, “Not this mom! My other mom. I remember on Friday nights — then it turned into every single day — she’d do her hair to go to the bar, and she’d be really pretty.”
Aleisha has lived with so many different adults — her birth mother, her grandparents, a foster family and, since she was 11, her adoptive parents, Lexi and Sean Deece-Cassidy — that even she sometimes mixes them up. At breakfast she announces, with a conspiratorial smile, “My mom is anti-boy.”
“No, I’m not,” Lexi laughs, “you’re thinking of your —”
“Foster mom!” Aleisha suddenly remembers.
In many ways, her adoptive parents (or “forever family,” in adoption lingo) are your average above-average couple: articulate and well-educated, with good jobs — Lexi, 37, manages organizational learning at a large corporation, and Sean, 43, is a graphic designer — and an upscale home in a woodsy enclave just north of Orillia, Ont. Yet they are also outliers: one of the rare couples in Canada willing to adopt an older child from foster care. Even before they got married in 2003, they planned to adopt. “We just figured, why not have a kid who really needs parents?” says Sean.
The popular image of adoption involves babies (typically foreign ones), infertile couples (relatively wealthy ones, as an international adoption costs $20,000 to $60,000) and agonizing delays. For most people, adopting from the public system doesn’t even register as an option, even though it can be relatively quick and doesn’t cost a penny. In 2004, only about 2,300 Canadian children were placed in permanent homes; currently, anywhere from 30,000 to 40,000 children are legally free for adoption.
