"Don't cover your children's eyes when they see us walk by. Don't offer that forced caress with a rehearsed smile. It doesn't help." So writes Carla, a small but fierce mother of Roberta. Following her earlier *Apparent Differences* (again with Stefano Martello), De Angelis returns in a new essay—clear-eyed and passionate—to tell what it means to mother a daughter who is "different." Different to the quick, uncomfortable gaze of a world that passes by unseeing. Her words, which often carry the weight of poetry, strike hard because they demand, crying out with love, the right to be truly seen.
She calls on doctors for real listening and attention (a demand far different from asking for miracles). She calls on institutions to support families instead of forcing them to fight daily just to have their right to a dignified life recognized. De Angelis names a crucial flaw in our sometimes hypocritical world: diversity must be respected "even when it shows itself as handicap." Everyone has something particular about them, and we must begin "from that something in order to start working." What matters is that everyone be given the same chance to grow into their own potential.
Yet De Angelis's words also demand that we listen to ourselves as parents. By opening "a window onto the unknown," authentic motherhood becomes a path that forces us to rethink every standard measure of normal growth. There is no room for sentiment in Carla. "I let events visit my thoughts and mind before choosing a road. Every choice excludes others, so when choice is necessary, it is almost always a loss, whatever form it takes."
Quiet but firm, there is also a strong call to each of us—to Carla as our neighbor, to Roberta as our neighbor, in the everyday. Integration is not an empty idea or theory. It is something made real through concrete gestures, attitudes, and feelings. "In coming together we do not erase differences, but place them face to face to strengthen dignity and existence."
Giulia Galeotti, 2009