My son’s heart was drifting away. Even though he was close to me, inside me, he was distant. He made an unbearable sound, the sound of things-people-about to disappear; a trail of shattered glass, a faint sign of existence and then nothing more. There was only one way to try to make him beat again, harder, to detach him from me.
It was my fault: I was thirty-two weeks pregnant and I had spent those seven months repeating that I hated pregnancy. Life was punishing me for my ingratitude. Yet, I loved Lucio. I loved it from the first second it was just a line on a stick soaked in pee. But I hated waiting for him, I couldn’t stand the anxiety of the visits, the physical fatigue, the sacrifices, the fears, the information to learn and the information to ignore. I couldn’t stand the fear that something could go wrong. I looked at myself in the mirror every morning and checked my belly which was growing very little in the meantime. I told the doctors, I said “look at me, don’t you think I’m small?” and they told me again that everything was going well. Everyone around me called me paranoid. I was the one who didn’t know how to enjoy anything, not even the most beautiful moment of his life. And so I pretended, I wore increasingly tighter clothes, I even went so far as to eat more pasta and bread to swell my stomach and convince everyone, including me, that inside, beyond the fabric, after my skin, there was a life. I pretended until the day of that ultrasound, the one where I realized I was right: the baby wasn’t growing. His situation was progressively degenerating but he was not yet at the point where he was at his limit. The choice was mine. I had to decide whether to get to the edge of the cliff, or give birth. “On one side it has science, on the other there is hope” this is what the gynecologist told me sitting at the desk in a room without windows. Between us was the bundle of papers that I would have to sign in case I decided that my son would be born prematurely, underweight, forced into at least a month of intensive care. The choice I made sleeps in the light of the computer with which I write this article.
From then on nothing was as I saw in the films or heard in the stories of others, or even imagined in the years when I thought that sooner or later I would become a mother. The day my son came into the world I didn’t smile, I didn’t utter a word of joy. Despair took everything from me, took away my eyes, my mouth, my saliva, the strength in my hands and the strength in my legs immobilized by anesthesia. My family didn’t come to the hospital to embarrass me with flowers and balloons – it would have been useless, only parents enter intensive care – I didn’t eat sushi like the girls on TikTok, I didn’t post any stories to announce the happy event . When my partner and I found ourselves in front of the “Birth Office” sign, I couldn’t help but notice that underneath, in small letters, the writing read “and death declarations”. I realized that in no book, in any doctor’s office, on any social media, have I read about that eventuality and that if it had happened to me (after all, I had come so close) I would have lacked practical and emotional instructions. The danger of a single narrative on pregnancy reverberates in that awareness of mine: a single model also means a single interpretation, and those who are outside the model not only feel wrong but are also in more difficulty than the others. Just like me.
The first time I saw my son I didn’t memorize his face; the nose covered by a long tube, the cheeks occupied by machinery, the nape of the neck held tight in a faded yellow helmet. My baby lived inside a plastic box with six holes, two on each side, one in front, one behind, the only accesses for my hands, too big if I had wanted to give him a caress. Or maybe it was me who didn’t want to touch him, I was afraid, I refused to touch the evidence of my pain. For a while, in the early days of his existence, I stopped being his mother. When I spent my days with my nose pressed against the plastic watching him, I was not his mother; when I finally picked him up and sweated every time the monitor he was attached to flashed red, I was not his mother. A mother is courageous, strong, and I even cried to go to the bathroom, when the stitches in the scar pulled until I cried out, and everything, even fulfilling a basic need, reminded me that I had not been able to bring a child into the world. healthy. A mother is happy. A mother is cool, and I wandered the hospital corridors in the same shirt for days, smelling of sweat and sadness. A mother is prepared. I didn’t know anything. At night I repeated the doctors’ updates in my head, I went over the stages of his recovery, only every now and then I allowed myself to imagine our family walking in an avenue behind the house, up and down like people who have nothing better to do than talking in a crowded street. I believed that that banal normality would never come for us and even today, today that Lucio is at home, I am waiting for it, just as I wait to kiss his cheeks or have my best friend hold him in the arms. I rejoice for every gram he gains, I cry if he wears a bigger onesie, I get excited about changing the size of his diapers. I’m still too young to be his mother – maybe younger than him – even though I wanted it, even though I want it, I’m not ready. My son is the scariest and most exciting adventure at the same time, he is also the most concrete representation of the anguish I have for death, but at the same time he is the best image of life I have ever had before my eyes. He has many shapes, but none of them resemble those designed by others. He and I are distant from traditional narratives, we still live in hospital rooms where we were afraid of no longer existing, and in the future plans of moments together, in the dreams we dreamed with caution, laughing secretly when others told us how we should have been. While they explain to us what mother-son love is, we get distracted and sing to Lucio Dalla.