«Life can simply rain down on you—a life you never expected in any way.» Akin is eager to tell his story. He's one of the protagonists in We'll Amaze You With Special Defects (Giunti 2020), a book by Patrizia Rinaldi and Francesca Assirelli for children about three kids: Alba, Huang, and Akin himself. Like a fairy tale, the narrating voices present an experience capable of turning rejection into love and welcome. The path is full of obstacles—not just at the beginning, when parents reject their newborns because they aren't what they expected, but the certainty underlying every word and illustration is that love «goes where it pleases». Another story is possible.
Alba opens the book. She's eighteen months old, has a cat, a father, and Down syndrome. Adult readers knew her story years ago through newspapers, and especially through Born for You (Einaudi 2018), a book in which Luca Trapanese, together with Luca Mercadante, told the story of his daughter.
When Trapanese receives the phone call from the court in July 2017, Alba isn't yet a month old. Because of her extra chromosome, more than thirty families have rejected her. It will be Trapanese, who is single, who adopts her. The newspapers run the story of the Neapolitan benefactor who brought home the Down syndrome girl rejected by everyone, but beneath the cloying sentimentality lies a precious story made of love, intelligence, knowledge, and community.
Trapanese's choice is the fruit of both his desire for fatherhood and his understanding of disability. When Alba arrives at his home, he has already spent years founding and running an association in Naples that works daily with disabled adults; a shelter for vulnerable mothers; an after-school program for at-risk children; a community in the hills of upper Caserta where teenagers with disabilities experience life away from their families; a residential center for terminally ill children or those with severe malformations. This daily lived experience is what allows Trapanese not to judge the many rejections Alba faced. He understands they spring from the fear and ignorance of an unprepared society, while his own choice flows from the conviction that disability is not a defeat but a way of being. «Alba is not the victim of her disability but of our apartheid. Some people think, with culpable simplicity, that you can treat disability like an illness and solve it by finding a cure. But trisomy is a way of being.»
Born for You is written by two men who are identical in name, sex, and fatherhood—and different in everything else. Trapanese is a practicing Catholic, gay, has lived with disability for years, and has an extended family. Mercadante is atheist, straight, pro-abortion, has a small family, and is deeply skeptical that a child with disability could make a man a father (and he has major problems with his own son's celiac disease). Two completely different worlds. I confess I found Mercadante exasperating at times. («What do you think you'll get out of it?» he writes at one point. «Even granting the existence of paternal instinct, do you really think you'll satisfy it this way? If so, well, I don't think it will be possible.») But Trapanese is patient. He responds («The real difference between Andrea and Alba won't be their different IQs, but that most of the roads are built for your son's bike») and above all, he proves through his actions the truth of what he claims.
The story of Alba and her father perfectly embodies the urgent need to keep the child at the center (which Antonio Mazzarotto illustrates in his article), emphasizing how adoption must be rooted in the child's needs, not the adult's right to become a parent. This distinction changes everything. It's captured in a scene from Alba's adoption: Trapanese is pleased that the judge is on his side and the little girl's. He tells the judge so. The judge cuts him short: «Not on your side. On hers. The girl's.»
But I'm left with a doubt. I'm adding to my to-do list a visit to the National Library. I want to dig through the parliamentary debate that led to the approval of law 184/1983, specifically the provision allowing single people to adopt children with disabilities. I've always read this provision with horror because, in my view, it implicitly asserts that there are first-class children (perfect and so precious to the State that they deserve a complete family) and second-class children (flawed and so little valued that they must settle for a «crippled» family). I support adoption for single parents. What I reject is yet another divide between us and them, between those who are able-bodied and those with evident fragilities (and honestly, in this case you'd need twenty parents, not two, but that's another story). Still, stories like Alba's might one day—hopefully not too far off—suggest to lawmakers a new way of seeing.
«It may be a dream,» Trapanese writes, «but I dream of a world where that woman doesn't perceive Alba's Down syndrome as a disease to pity, but only as one of her traits—one among a hundred others that make her an individual, and that's all.»