My sister called Saturday with the news that her sixteen-year-old daughter has been hospitalized. As a special-needs child, she has been sidelined into special ed., even though she's intelligent. The school system has failed her abysmally. In her class of only five kids, there is a teacher, who is aided by two aides. They do very little with the students. Two of them sit and quilt, and one of them sits and reads. Amber is getting no education, and it makes her miserable. She has gotten so unhappy that she's threatening to harm herself. One out of ten girls cuts herself, and though Amber doesn't have the manual dexterity to do much harm to herself, the fact that she is so miserable makes me very unhappy. I'm glad that she's getting the meds that a psychiatrist is putting her on, but this kid has been through so much. I wish I could be nearer so that I could help her.
The world is so sadly full of if-only this, if-only that. If only Sally had not had such pathetic health care when she was pregnant.... Now, with her own health so poor, she's just run out of steam. She is not up to the challenge of caring for Amber physically, and she's never been up to the challenge of caring for her educationally. If I had one piece of advice to parents of special-needs children, it would be to move to a big city with a lot of facilities for their children. Living as she does in this tiny backwards little town, Amber has the worst of all worlds. I wish I could magically spirit her into a more progressive area, but that's not possible. Why do we imagine that scenarios like Slumdog Millionaire happen only in India or other countries? Why can't we look within and see that daily, many children in the good old U.S. of A. are getting substandard education, bad or no health care, and no cultural enrichment beyond their bass-ackwards fundamentalist churches?
I'm frustrated.
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