chi is a good mom? The question is asked by the television series The Good Mothersthe good mothers, which traces the stages of awareness and rebellion of three Calabrian women, collaborators of justice against the ‘Ndrangheta: Lea Garofalo, her daughter Denise and Giuseppina Pesce. In the background, a Calabria never seen before, beautiful but inaccessibleenclosed in the villages of its mountains, guardians of secrets and oppression.
Danda Santini director of “iO Donna” (photo by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert).
What drives a mother to defy family laws, to testify against her husband, to challenge the clan? To abandon one’s world – home, certainties, affections and habits -, for a hunted life, fleeing from one refuge to another, with the breath down the neck of those who seek you to punish you for the transgression?
Always and only the fierce attachment to children and their future. Not their own, which will be a sentence to hell, without homeland and roots, but theirs, the only one who justifies the sacrifice of a life, their own. Only from that uprooting can another law be born.
“You belong to no one but yourself. You decide your life” is the message that Lea Garofalo delivers to her daughter before being killed, freeing her from a chain of blood and silence. It is the same stubborn sentiment of those who leave a newborn in front of the hospitalwith a letter of love and heartbreak, so that someone can offer that son a better future, at the cost of his own eternal pain. Who holds a baby to his chest and gets on a boatand what kind of land is his land if he has the courage to take the sea route, which has swallowed up too many.
Of all single mothers, due to abandonment or misfortunewho started as children to grit their teeth with their heads down, toil and humiliation, starting from South America or the Philippines, in order to be able to snatch their children from their bitter destiny.
I’ve met many of them, babysitters, cleaners and caregivers, who didn’t see their children get boysaway for years in a row, during the holidays looking for a job as a substitute to send home more remittances, dreaming of them as graduates.
And in front of their composure I was ashamed, I who always had my children at hand, to kiss and hug when I wanted, even if they ran away and got naughty. But I knew that if I was less fortunate, I too would sail the oceans for them.
Illustration by Cinzia Zenocchini
Mother’s Day is a bottom-up movement, to thank the dedication of those who have nourished, raised, accompanied us, in every moment of life. As children we looked up proudly handing out a little drawing made at school, today we bend over to caress our mothers who have become little ones again, proud of us.
It is the celebration of all of us that we have had a caring person. Always good, a priori, just for being there and giving oneself. More or less capable, good enough, imperfect, distracted, anxious. Sometimes too tired to play or too stressed to smile. Courageous mothers and normal mothers, without rhetoric and without heroics. But who have always wanted, only and simply, our good.
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