How do you find the right words—tender words—to speak of something so demanding? This is not about asserting rights and duties once more, after all. Those conversations have happened countless times already.
The expectation of a child is one of life's most delicate moments for a couple, especially when they have welcomed this child with love and dreamed of him or her as the fulfillment of their love for each other.
How eagerly they wait for the first signs of his or her presence. With what tenderness they begin to speak to this unborn child, so he or she will know from the start that they are already loved, that they cannot wait to see that face, those eyes, that smile. They hope. They dream. They wait.
But sometimes an exam, a visit, an ultrasound comes and shatters that hope, those dreams, that anticipation.
Something is wrong. There is a small problem.
Then begins a long ordeal of tests and more tests, of hints and silences, of clarity and confusion.
If doctors cannot guide this devastating moment with skill and wisdom; if they cannot explain in simple, caring language what is happening to that forming life; if they cannot put themselves in the shoes of those who are listening—a mother and father bewildered and afraid—to help them understand that beyond the diagnosis there is a child waiting to know them and to be loved and held exactly as he or she is. If those nearby—family and friends—are not ready to share their pain, to offer unconditional support; if the two parents, instead of drawing closer in the love they have promised each other, pull away because they are too wounded or unable to face what is happening; then it is all too easy to fall into panic, into anguish, into terror that they will not survive this. And they sink into emptiness and darkness.
Or.
The pages that follow simply want to help us understand—not exhaustively, certainly—how important it is for everyone, not only those living through it, to inform ourselves, to learn, to accompany and concretely support, with great love, those who find themselves facing a difficult wait. So that—we wish this for them with all our hearts—they can hold their child in their arms, and whatever he or she will be, that child will know how to pour out their love on those who had the strength and the heroism to love them completely.
Mariangela Bertolini, 2006