Giovanni doesn't walk, but we hope he will one day. He doesn't speak, but he knows how to make himself understood perfectly well. He doesn't see the way we do, but he knows how to show us many things. If you ask him his name, he'll answer by pressing his lips together in a smack. A smack like a kiss. Sometimes I think Giovanni lives himself as a kiss, and in fact he is in many ways love in its purest form. Giovanni loves to play, but he doesn't play the way other children do.
I don't spend my free time with my son: quite simply, I'm not sure I manage to make myself understood, so I spend my time with him.
I'm still in that phase of being the parent of a handicapped child, still stuck in the anger I haven't moved past. So even when I'm alone with him, I partly play and partly curse some doctor who hurt him or some judge who denied us justice.
Here's how it usually goes: he sits across from me in his high chair with a nice little table in front of him, his favorite toys nearby. The farm with animals, the building blocks that let him make towers that reach the sky, the piano or the singing snail, his beloved cardboard books. All toys for babies three months and up. When I think about it, I get angry and think things shouldn't have gone this way, that I can't figure out what Giovanni understood just now from the nursery rhyme I finished reading him, whether those plastic ducks from the farm that I move left to right are really ducks to him or just shapes, just things.
I'm not ashamed to say that in these moments I have to get up from my chair, step away, nurse my wounded pride somewhere else.
But here's the thing: there's no time to feel sorry for yourself when Giovanni's around. Or at least not in that moment. He'll let you leave him for maybe ten seconds. After that he starts calling you and won't stop until you're back in your chair across from him, where you belong. One of his favorite games is pretending to send you away. With his left hand—which does the work of both—he makes an unmistakable gesture: bye-bye. Go on, you can leave.
But the moment you start to go, he calls you back with a mocking laugh. Then you have a choice: return, or hide behind a door or wall and peek out. The result is guaranteed: his laugh and his eyes like radar searching for you, finding you at last, lighting up. That's one of those moments when you feel a satisfaction that rises above every hard thing you know, every awareness of his limits and yours. You understand that he's given you a moment of love. You remember what a good therapist told us desperate parents when Giovanni was just a few months old: "He'll always do his best."
There are also rituals in our time together that go beyond play. Food, for instance. When I'm home and it's around lunchtime or dinnertime, it's a certainty that Giovanni will demand that I be the one to feed him. It's not just a polite request. He actually grabs his mother's wrist and physically prevents her from feeding him. I have to surrender to the sweet violence. I sit down, start talking to him, feeding him, and more and more often I let him take the spoon so he can eat on his own.
I'd say I'm luckier than his mother because I can choose when to spend time with him. Giovanni knows this, and I like to believe he thinks of me when I'm not there, that he thinks about when we'll be together and swap kisses and raspberry kisses.
Carlo, 2005