I am not sure I can write this sensibly. If you have not lived this dynamic it may seem pretty cut and dried, and truly it is not. I know that my daughter has serious behavioral issues that likely mean that she would trash a lap top in a rage in short order. I know that without adequate supervision she probably can not even navigate a laptop successfully and get it to do what she wants it to do. I have bought her untold numbers of personal stereos, boom boxes, ipods and mp3 players over the year. I don't think any of them have lasted more than a couple of months.
If it was one of my kids who live here at home, it would be a no brainer. I would say they were not ready for the thing they were asking for and that would be that. But Fi is different. She is not with me day in and day out. The way she feels loved is through looking at her possessions. Through being able to say to a peer or a staff member: "My family gave me this." she feels loved and feels important. She looks to tangible possessions as proof of love and of the constancy of our presence in her life. And I get that. If I had the kind of life that my daughter has had, I think I would feel exactly the same way. There is also a level of parental guilt that I feel over Fiona. Part of me will always feel that I did not do enough, try hard enough or whatever with her. All the professional evals detailing the scope of my daughter's challenges are not enough to diminish that kernel of inadequacy that I always feel about her.
So the next thing I knew, the kids were in bed and I was cruising the internet looking for refurbished laptops. Which i found pretty reasonably. It would still be an expensive gift, but I could juggle things and make it happen. I did, in a moment of clarity, email Amazing Jane and tell her what I had found and ask her opinion and this week she called me.
She said that the situation is more complex and laid it out for me. The social worker is a good one and has not dropped the ball. Fiona has a chance to have a laptop. The problem is that the school has safety rules that preclude any student tapping into their internet network. Students are also prohibited from using social network sites because of a myriad of issues that make sense to me at one level and none at another. But it is what it is. So in reality, if Fiona wanted to download music or print a picture, she could not do it on her laptop. She would have to put it on a flash drive, go to staff and they would have to do this on the school server. Jane said the school has been reluctant to have this conversation with Fi because it will be hard. She will be angry and have behavioral issues and this time of year is notoriously difficult for her anyway. They are sort of being ostriches and putting their heads in the sand and hoping that she will forget about it.
And she might. This week when she called, she had her clothing sizes and wants clothes for Yule. Clothes I can do. And we share a love of fashion and a strong
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