"You're crazy to have had two more children after Philippine," a friend tells me, mixing admiration with bewilderment. I laugh and shoot back, "You're the one who's completely crazy—you adopted children with disabilities!"
This brief exchange shows how blind we are to ourselves. We tend to admire in others the very qualities we possess. To admire others, then, is to learn who we are. Tell me who you admire and I'll tell you who you are. I learned this once again reading about Tugdual Derville's founding of A Braccia Aperte (ABO). I said to my husband, "The Dervilles are incredible. Two young newlyweds who go to ABO every other weekend." And it didn't occur to me that for 17 years our family has been active at A Braccia Aperte: 12 years for 365 days a year and 5 years for 120 days a year, including three weekends out of four and six weeks of vacation.
What seems ordinary to us becomes a marvel when we see someone else do it. Yet these two stories unsettle me, because I sense something deeper in myself. If I had never become the mother of a daughter with a disability—and the sister of a person with a disability (something you don't choose)—would I have ever decided to draw close to these precious people? I'm not so sure. Suddenly I felt small. Very small. And so I begin, little by little, to accept my own smallness. I learn to appreciate, without comparing myself to them, those people who, with a generosity that overwhelms me, choose to adopt or to serve the most fragile.
This is the tender ache that biological mothers and adoptive mothers may feel when they meet. Neither should judge the other, nor judge herself. Each can simply be herself in the uniqueness of her own calling. One has been called to welcome the unexpected gift of fragility; the other has been called to choose to serve. Each bears witness to two faces of the same grace: accepting that we are not masters of our own lives, and the will to stand with the smallest. Neither mother is greater than the other. Different, yet each in her own way, both serve life—in the mystery of their own capacities and limits.
Sophie Lutz (from O&L no. 218)
Trans. by Rita Massi
