All the parents present here, I believe, can confirm this: in waiting, there is waiting. There is a natural birth—nine months in a mother’s womb. But what happens when the birth is through adoption?
What takes place during those nine natural months, or during the two, three—four or five—years of a national adoption process, as with Maurizio, or an international adoption like Alejandra’s, who comes from Colombia? What happens is that every father and every mother create projections about the child who will come, whether by birth or by adoption. It doesn’t fully match reality even in a natural pregnancy, but with adoption it does so even less… the projection of the perfect child: tall and handsome, or blond with blue eyes, beautiful as the sun and destined to become President of the Republic, to go to the moon… but with disability? You meet reality.
Of course, there is an initial phase of acceptance—you work on it, you struggle daily; it remains hard to accept and takes different lengths of time. For me, then, there was a miracle: discovering all the beauty of our children. For me, Alejandra and Maurizio are something unique. And when you get past that phase and discover what you can find, it’s something wonderful. Maurizio has taken me into a thousand worlds filled with other amazing Maurizios: from Special Olympics—sport for people with intellectual disabilities—to inclusive theatre, music therapy, and… Fede e Luce! They help you discover beauty: no one hugs like they do, no one—no one—sees beauty the way they do, as they do.
Maurizio has been doing an internship at a greengrocer’s for six years; in the first year, at one point, the owner had an argument with an employee. Maurizio stepped in and made peace. Who else among us would have done that? Of course, when the honorary judge of the National Juvenile Court of Rome calls you and begins talking about Maurizio—an extremely premature baby weighing just 800 grams, with life-or-death surgeries in his first month of life… it’s a miracle that he’s here, alive. The honorary judge was a child neuropsychiatrist: at one year old Maurizio weighed five kilos, he didn’t walk, didn’t speak, didn’t have head control… but he also told us he could not determine what Maurizio’s future might be. We asked where to sign—and that was that.
And yet there was the whole tough phase of accepting what he could not do. But then that world opened up—and I believe I became a better person.
