Hello, to you.
To you, who are reading our pages because you have encountered the monster known as Perinatal Grief on your path and are trying to survive each day without crumbling. And to make something good out of it, if possible.
To you, who wonder if this is the place for you, because you, they tell you, lost your child so early.
To you, who already have other children, and, they tell you, you shouldn’t suffer so much for what happened and should instead be content.
To you, who don’t yet have children but would like as many as an outstretched hug can hold. And even more.
To you, who don’t want children, because being a daughter is enough for you, and you just can’t understand how one can suffer for a “pregnancy gone wrong.”
To you, who are fighting to have children, and, even if you don’t know it, are fighting not to be crushed by the weight of a diagnosis that tries day by day to shatter your identity as a woman. Perfect in itself. As such.
To you, who have a child and lost his twin, and every day you go up and down from earth to heaven, to be a mother in both places.
To you, who hate your body, which allowed your child to leave.
To you, for whom everything flows the same day after day, because you’ve lost yourself in the grief tunnel and don’t even know it anymore.
To you, who think you exist only as a mother, and forget that one is a mother after being a woman. And that you exist, anyway, and are beautiful just as you are.
To you, who think you don’t deserve any joy, because “what is a woman without children,” they say.
To you, surrounded by strollers everywhere, and nothing more. And you wish to disappear.
To me, and to all of you.
To our wonderful wombs, even the traitorous ones. Even the silent ones. Even those that were here yesterday and are gone today. To those cut and recut.
To what we are, regardless of what we have or haven’t had, regardless of what happened to us.
To our bodies, which always deserve respect, listening, care.
To our beautiful dreams, and to us for managing to dream them regardless.
To the girls we once were.
To our infinite nuances, to what we are today, and what we can still be in the days to come.
To the beauty that shines on us when we manage to say: “I am fine, just as I am.”
To my mother, who taught me to be a woman and to be proud of who I am, and never to lower my head for being the way I am.
To my sister, who teaches little women and little men self-confidence and sharing.
To Cinzia, a doll maker who comes straight from the asteroid of The Little Prince, I know it.
To my grandmother Marta, and her love for beauty.
To all the women of CiaoLapo, special mothers of traveler children.
Happy March 8th
Don’t forget to dance your wonder, for the women you are.
