Giovanna Spantigati

"Don Gnocchi" is a well-known rehabilitation center in Turin. My son is now having his therapy and I wait outside, sitting on a bench. If silence is a therapy for tension and stress, in this situation it is only isolation.

The nothingness that reminds you how fragile you are. A constant, sadistic question: You remember why you're here, don't you? Of course we mothers do. So I feel discouraged by this emptiness in my heart, and I enter the center. The small waiting room is full of mothers who read just to let time go by. I pretend to read a book but I look at them sidelong, being careful not to bother. Beautiful women. All quiet. They live with dignity and are proud of their children and who live their lives with great determination and passion.

Smiling women, sitting with the class and elegance of Queens. Women who do not even look at you because they already know everything about you. Here they don't cry, they fight without pretense, without masks, with an inner fire that gives a special light to their eyes. Women you can see again in the same waiting room after years. Never a hair out of place, never say an extra word.
They just wait. They are like young soldiers, obedient to their merciless fate, never doubting their faith. And they wish they couldn't think, while here.

They try to make you believe that it is routine, that they accept this endless pain because they know they have to do it for their children. If you do not believe in the effects of your child's therapy, he will never do. And you do want to believe in it, because you have nothing left. And while you're here, in a place outside the world, you think how much you would like to be mixed up with that world. People who do not look at you, not any longer. To have a simple normal life. Great women, sweet lionesses.
If they understand you don't feel compassion, they leave their book on their knees and talk to you with cheerfulness and you feel you are talking to yourself in the mirror. You are overcome by their determination but above all by their smiles. And you find out that humor and irony is what you have in common. And when time is over and you have to leave you realize time has flown by and you didn't even notice. Don't you know the mothers in Don Gnocchi in Turin?
And the mothers in the rehabilitation center in your town? You don't know what you've missed.


Giovanna Spantigati