Dear parents, dear friends,
With this issue—number four of 1988—I want first of all to send each of you, and your children, a special Christmas wish on behalf of the Ombre e Luci editorial board. Christmas, after all, is a family feast.
It has become tradition to dedicate our December issue to family life, because we know that during this season, suffering of any kind and depth can feel especially sharp.
These past days I have spoken with several mothers of disabled children. Mothers worn down not only by their child's disability, but also—and perhaps most of all—by abandonment. Abandonment by husbands, by relatives, by friends. Rejection by schools that in theory have opened their doors. Loneliness that weighs on them and transforms into anger and aggression toward everyone. The impossibility of weeping and crying out, because the child is there beside them, waiting only for love and a smile, joy and peace, devotion and sacrifice, without respite, without compromise.
The two letters that open these pages tell you only part of the burden of such a trial.
We have tried, through our articles and testimonies, to restore strength, confidence, and hope. Those who write here have sought to show how it is possible—how it is necessary—to find the way forward, whatever the cost, for the sake of their child's quality of life. By accepting help. By asking for support and friendship. By surrounding their child's early development with care and attention. By trusting certain tasks of education and rehabilitation to those who have greater resources and skill.
It is not easy, we know that well.
This is why we ask our readers once again to be voices for these families, to know how to knock on certain doors, to create—or discover—solidarity and expertise, or even some small service, for those who cannot manage alone.
We say it again, for those reading us for the first time: Ombre e Luci is not simply a magazine to read. It is above all a bond among members of one large family who wish, this year as always, to celebrate together the Light that came into the world to free us from darkness—the deepest and darkest darkness.
- Mariangela Bertolini, 1988