Antonella Baccaro (photo by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert).
CThere are letters that I keep aside because I’m having a hard time finding thoughts and words to respond with.
This is the case of a reader, we’ll call her Maria, who writes: «In February my father passed away and now I find myself – an only child – having to “manage” a mother who has lost many cognitive faculties and is no longer able to look after to itself. After months in which I tried to look after her, I decided, despite a thousand feelings of guilt, to entrust her to a facility.to. She struggles in a perpetual state of agitation, suffering, perhaps even anger. In all of this I realized I didn’t love her. I feel pain, sorrow, sorrow for her but not love. It weighs on me that I have never had a relationship of trust with her, and that she has explicitly rejected this relationship. It weighs on me that I have always perceived her benevolence as a counterpart to my behavior in line with her expectations. His emotional coldness weighs on me, having always been only the object and cause of his worries. If years ago I managed to make peace with the idea that after all she did what she could, today I feel this lack of love overwhelmingly. There is no resentment or anger, just awareness that things are like this, that mother and daughter love is not at all obvious and automatic. In both directions».
I struggled to respond to Maria because in my experience the mother is pure energy, desire to live, joy. Maria today pines for the relationship she never had. But most of all I think it weighs on her that she can’t recover it: there is no longer awareness in that being who has to look after. It’s too late to attempt a dialogue between adults. It’s too late to even legitimately close the door behind you.
Perhaps, however, precisely in that state of extreme need, Maria managed to grasp a truth: mothers are people like any other, they have often become such without a vocation or, even worse, without having resolved themselves. In that mother who now awaits care and a little sweetness, Maria can finally grasp the fragility that she never granted her. This is no time to complain, Maria. It’s time to recognize it. And hug her.
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