There is the Amanda Todd that the world came to know.
That is the Amanda who was harassed, stalked and bullied in an ordeal that started in cyberspace and spread to the schoolyard, and who at 15 took her own life.
Her death and the much-publicized video that she created chronicling her ordeal left people thinking they knew Amanda.
Around the world, commentators, parents, educators and experts are all weighing in with their thoughts on Amanda and on her life. Anonymous letters filled with criticism purport to spill the teen’s innermost secrets.
What is missing, says her mother Carol, is the story of what it was really like for Amanda.
“Let it be known that she shared everything with me,” said Carol Todd, speaking Friday at her Port Coquitlam home. “I knew all the stuff that she did.
“She would sit at the kitchen table and show me stuff and tell me stuff. She shared all this. She wasn’t a kid at the end that kept things in.”
The story of Amanda’s life starts, not with her birth but in the weeks before her death, when she came home from hospital, where she had been treated for severe depression. Amanda was recovering enough confidence to venture back into the world after spending the summer at home, too anxiety-ridden to go out.
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It was then that Carol Todd said her daughter was taunted by people who discovered she had been in hospital. People she once considered her friends taunted her for being in “the crazy house.”
“It didn’t really help that after she got out of the hospital recently some kids started calling her ‘psycho’ and saying she had been in the crazy hospital.”
“She went to the hospital, she had therapy, she had counselling, she was on a good track. On the day she gets out, that happens. I shake my head and I think, ‘Are kids really that nasty, do they really not think, what if it was them?’”
Amanda’s parents were separated. When Amanda was in Grade 7, she went to live with her father. After two years – last March – she came back to live with her mom. Carol had her room redecorated, the “princess” room her daughter always wanted.
“I’ve had my parenting stuff with Amanda but we worked it out,” said Carol. “Was I the bad parent? No. The people surrounding me will easily vouch for that.
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“I did all I could for her, with all her personal struggles, I managed to find her the right medical stuff, I helped find her the right educational tools, she wanted to cheerlead again but her anxieties wouldn’t enable her to, but I know … she wanted to sing again.
“All those things were in place for her as soon as she was ready to start.”
Carol, a teacher who works with children with learning disabilities, recognized early on that her daughter had learning challenges. She knew raising her would take more time and effort than it would for a typical child.
“Amanda has always had spirit, she’s been a spirited child in terms of what she did when she was a baby, what she did as a toddler, what she did when she was growing up in elementary school,” said Carol.
“She always had a mind of her own; she knew what she wanted and did it. Some of it were kid things, there were naughty things and there were good things.
“The good things about her was she cared about anything and everything that crossed her path.”
Amanda was a smart child but her learning disabilities often left her at the bottom of the class, the brunt of jokes.
Carol remembers Amanda coming home from Maple Ridge secondary school and telling her how the class had to read their quiz scores out loud. Amanda got a failing mark. She told her mom the teacher said students could say their score out loud or go up to him and tell him quietly. Amanda figured going up to the teacher would be just as bad as saying it out loud, since everyone would know.
“‘I heard them laughing at me,’” Amanda told her mother.
Carol said Amanda’s language-based learning disability led some in the school system to think she was just a bad child.
“When some of those language problems came out, people thought she was a naughty child and really it was her not being able to communicate what she wanted to say. When we figured some of that out, we were able to get support and get her some strategies for coping skills.”
If Amanda had trouble with learning, she was talented in many other ways, her mother said.
“For a child who couldn’t remember social studies facts or where to put countries on a map, she could sing and she could remember words of a song.”
Carol says she has been hurt by the comments of other parents and online commentators who say Amanda didn’t have enough activities in her life. They’re wrong, says Carol.
“You know (the) media asks ‘Why wasn’t she in sports and activities to keep her busy? Why was she on the Internet?’
“Well she did use some Internet stuff on her down time but you know what, in her whole entire life she figure skated in our community and she swam competitively in the summer for a couple of years, she did gymnastics, she did soccer, she cheerleaded for six years, she played ice hockey in our community, she was busy.
“She did as much as any child could and maybe a little more.”
As for those who argue she should have taken away her daughter’s computer, Carol says it was not as simple as that.
“You can’t unplug a computer. It was hard to take her phone away as it is now the lifeline of most teenagers. Doing that would increase her anxiety and increase her depression because I’d be taking away typical teenage things.
“She didn’t feel she had a normal life…. My job as a mom was to make it better, not to make it worse. One of them was not taking away the Internet but trying to teach her how to use it properly.”
No one wants to think it could happen to their child, said Carol.
“It could happen to any child, there’s no social class thing,” she said. “Whether you’re a boy or a girl or you’re from this part of a community or that part of a community, it’s not a racial thing, it could happen to anybody’s kid.”
At the end of her video, Amanda held up a card that read: “I have nobody, I need someone.”
Carol says she didn’t understand why Amanda wrote that, but she never asked.
“Amanda touched the lives of tons of people but she didn’t realize it,” said Carol. “In her video she said she needed someone. She had lots of people around her.
“I will never know what she meant by that. I didn’t ask her at the time, but she wasn’t alone, she had all the supports and all the friends – well maybe she didn’t have all the friends.
“It was really hard for Amanda to determine which friends were true to her and which ones pretended to be true to her and that stabbed her in the back at the end.”
Carol said Amanda had counselling and medical support, and in her last months of school at Coquitlam Alternate Basic Education secondary, she found a safe and nurturing environment.
“We did everything we could. And ultimately at the end, I’m not even going to say it wasn’t enough. We did everything possible … short of being with her 24/7. I would have had to strap her onto me in order to watch her 24/7, but things can happen even when the whole family is in the house at the same time.”
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