This article is part of the Focus: adults with profound disabilities, some testimonies
Who would we have been if Monica, our beloved little one, had not revealed herself from her first months of life as a frail, defenseless creature, always dependent on us?
My husband and I often turn to these reflections when, at the end of an exhausting day, we find ourselves sharing our thoughts with each other.
We search sometimes within ourselves to find all the answers to our questions.
I believe that to be good parents, above all we must love God deeply.
Love for God—and even more, God's love for us—gives us a true understanding of the love we owe to others, to our neighbors, from the poorest person in this world to the one most dear to us, our own child.
No, I have not always loved God.
When Monica was born and needed us, needed our very lives, we loved her, yes, with all our hearts. But I, her mother, did not want her as she was.
Every day, every hour, I desperately sought—even as I loved her so—to change her, to inject into that wounded mind the impulses that might make it function, that might give me what she could not give me.
It would be pointless to describe the agony those hours held for all of us, but I can say that my desperate search for immediate results from my efforts had become an obsession.
My peace, the harmony of our family, that atmosphere of serenity so comforting for a husband and a son returning home—it no longer existed.
Andrea, a year and a half older than Monica, should behave like an adult in my mistaken view, and help me, and show understanding for his sister. Yet he was still so much a child himself, so much in need of childhood.
How could I have expected that of a little boy who perhaps could not even tell the difference between himself and his sister, especially when there was—is—such a strong bond of love between them?
And my husband, so understanding and patient, always tried to see through this behavior of mine, helping me grow day by day more aware of what God had called us to do.
But shouting into a deaf person's ears does not restore their hearing.
My wounded pride, the conviction that I had dealt my husband a grave disappointment because I held myself almost responsible for this birth, the realization that my home was slowly being abandoned by relatives and friends who, perhaps embarrassed and not knowing how to behave toward us, preferred to ignore us to avoid hurting us—that heavy burden of caring for my daughter, which grew heavier every day and every hour, made me increasingly nervous and short-tempered.
How much of our precious marriage did I spoil in that atmosphere of tension!
Other disappointments followed. We fought to find an institution that could care for her.
My trust in people dwindled day by day, and with it went my faith in God.
God who had been so close to us, who loved us, who wanted to reveal himself to us through Monica—and we could not see it.
The years passed this way, in anguish.
So many times we could bear no more.
We gave our children love, but it was love conditioned by the suffering we endured.
Andrea worried me because he grew shy and withdrawn, and Monica broke my heart. To me, to her mother, she was something to pity.
We came to know the friends of Fede e Luce, and at their invitation we went to Assisi.
In Assisi came the light.
Even now I cannot quite grasp that in a single moment I turned my whole life around—a life built over so many years of pain and grayness, as it seemed to me.
We finally understood that God had sent Monica to us with a special, particular task: to take us by the hand and lead us to him, who for so many years had been near us as beloved children, and whose call we had not known we were receiving. And we welcomed it with joy.
The love we now bear our children is made of understanding and lit by the faith that others had suffocated within us.
We accept and love Monica's limits and give her what she herself asks of us.
We love Andrea and are present for whatever he needs, offering him counsel, striving to understand him even when he does not want to be understood.
For too long he too had lived in the grip of our troubles to be ready for this change. But we trust in God and are certain that deep down he has understood us and loves us with a more complete love.
In the evening, when my husband and I meet and take each other's hand in spirit to walk our path together in true unity, we feel within us the love that the friends of Fede e Luce have given us. They are the authors of this new responsibility of ours.
They, with their steadfastness and devotion, are the ones who uncovered in us those human values that now, with them, we wish to make known to others.
To those parents who lack the peace of true family life; who, as we once did, love without joy, because like us they notice only selfishly what petty things they lack and cannot see the great gift they have in their child's smile.
No, we too were not good parents. But from now on we always will be, with God's help and that of our friends, and with them we wish to bear witness to the rediscovery of God in our wounded and weak children, who were sent to us by him with the most beautiful and greatest of missions: the power of our resurrection in faith.
The gathering in Cuneo, like Assisi, though in a different spirit, has once again deepened my joy in the incomparable fellowship that marks every Fede e Luce meeting.
To see each other is to see ourselves again. To share in a timid smile, to clasp an unresponsive hand—it draws us all into the struggles of others and makes us feel the parents of all, lavish with love for all. And we receive so much good that we wish to scatter it to the four winds so it might flood every dark cave, console every sorrowing creature, and awaken the shoots of the purest love in hearts hardened by the selfishness of this old world that exists only because God exists.
Maria Varoli, 1979