MOTHER SUPERIOR

Every day, traumatized kids are removed from their parents and made Crown wards. The lucky ones get cared for by Cindy Stirling. In the last 30 years, she’s fostered 200, providing school lunches, rides to swimming lessons and a home where everyone feels safe and loved.

- Luc Rinaldi

CINDY STIRLING’S life has always revolved around kids. The eldest of six, she grew up caring for her younger siblings. After high school, she enrolled at Seneca College in Toronto to begin training as a cop—she figured it would be a good way to protect children—but she dropped out after a year to take a more direct approach as a residential counsellor with Community Living, a non-profit for people with disabilities.

In 1985, she met her future husband, Ross, who worked at a centre for youth with mental health problems in Oshawa, Ont. Stirling would pick him up from work before dates, chatting with the teens while she waited. Soon after, she studied family and rehabilitative work, and began a new career in social work.

The Stirlings married in 1986. For them, the decision to become foster parents was easy. Through their work, they’d seen how many kids needed loving parents, and what happened when kids didn’t have them.

In 1999, they bought a four-bedroom house in Mississauga. Over the next 20 years, they filled it with children, as many as nine at a time. Three of them were theirs, biologically: Molly, Drew and Jaslan. The others were foster kids. If there was no one else to care about a kid, Cindy and Ross Stirling would.

Ross started doing sales and marketing for large companies, while Cindy worked part-time at Community Living and ran the household. She became, in fostering lingo, the “designated parent,” meaning she was the one dealing with child services, filing paperwork, talking to biological families and bringing kids to court.