We have excerpted these pages from Lynda Johnson Vitali's book "Call Me Alex."
[…]
Not far from the clinic, our apartment phone rang.
Paolo answered.
It was a nurse. She sounded distressed, but duty compelled her to make the call: the doctors had found something wrong with the newborn.
The baby might not be normal. He likely had Trisomy 21—Down syndrome. They couldn't be certain. They needed more tests.
My husband didn't understand what she was talking about.
But there was no need for euphemism. They were almost certainly saying mongolism.
Shock. Terror.
Paolo, the youngest of seven siblings, bolted by instinct straight to his mother.
His mother tried to console him. She knew pain well. She understood what it feels like when your life flips without warning, when you live through an instant—a single instant—in which everything changes. …
She had learned to survive suffering, even to live alongside it, to make it part of herself. Now she carried grief for a son.
A son in pain, a son crying, asking her why, why, pleading for her help, her strength, her courage.
And she gave him everything. Everything Paolo needed in that darkness, everything that might help him support the woman he loved and his newborn son.
[…]
We all went to see the doctor. It felt like a family outing: Paolo and me, Flaminia, the baby, and my mother, who would return to Canada soon after.
After the usual pleasantries, the doctor examined Alex carefully.
[…]
Lynda, your child has something wrong with him…
[…]
My throat began to burn. Wind tore through the roof of my mouth and rose into my brain, which clouded over, and without meaning to, a shattering scream tore from my mouth.
NO!
That cursed no flooded through me, blinding me, piercing me, making me deaf to anyone trying to hold me, to control me.
The baby in my husband's arms, then in my mother's arms, who took Flaminia by the hand and left the office with the children, while I collapsed onto that chair, folded over my belly. My belly. Where just a month before—only a month, insignificant and stupid—my baby had been and my perfect world. Perfect. An invisible sadist stood there and, freely, in front of everyone, was slicing me open with a blade. Cutting me into small pieces, making me smaller, smaller…
But I was a woman. I was a mother. So what was I doing facing that black hole? Who had put me there, in that situation, in that damned pain, and why?
Had my dreams vanished?
[…]
I had no crystal ball to see the future. I couldn't see Alex feeding himself like an adorable baby, or Alex at eight, excited to ride his bike for the first time, pedaling on his own without training wheels, or any of the countless victories that lay ahead. No. I couldn't see any of it. I couldn't even imagine what would come.
From "Call Me Alex" by Lynda Johnson Vitali, 2013