“I am not you.” It’s a desperate, silent, but ferocious cryof self-determination that boys and girls, growing up, try to convey to their parents. A need that is not understood, too many teenagers feel unseen, unheard. And a painful cycle is triggered with serious symptoms that tear families apart: self-harm, eating disorders, aggression, drug addiction, suicide attempts. And love is not enough. Into this jungle of suffering, incommunicability, unsaid words and words too many, the Veronese writer Matteo Bussola delves, in his new book Snow at the bottom of the sea (Einaudi, 192 pages, 17 euros).
The hospital department
The story unfolds within a hospital wardthere is a hospitalized son, Tommy, with anorexia nervosa, who has become a shadow of himself and a father, Tano, who assists him. The mother Grazia is at home, raising the other two daughters, twins. In Tano’s daily diarythere is their story, but also that of other “broken” families, the hospitalized boys and girls and the lost parents who are with them. There is Giacomo “Gap”, an aspiring influencer who he attempted suicide by throwing himself from the second floorEva, who has tripled her weight in a short time and pretends to be a child in a sort of regression, Marika who cuts herself to let out the pain she feels inside, Nicholas with an angelic appearance, who cannot bear frustrations and failures, explodes into violent fits of anger and aggression.
Impregnable fortresses
What happens every day in the ward is narrated in detail, the impotence and inability of parents to interact with their sons and daughters, to save them, the closure of boys and girls inside impregnable fortresses where the pathology is only the symptom. And the Covid pandemic, which for one reason or another, is responsible for having triggered the mechanism by which each of the boys and girls it started to self-destruct. «As a child you believed in everything… in my good intentions, in the imagination that leads to a result, you believed in your mother, you believed in me. You believed in yourself. Maybe growing up, after all, doesn’t mean anything other than this: stopping believing». Tano writes this at the beginning of his diary, in which he tries to understand why it all started and Tommy decided to destroy himself. Tano is an engineer, «someone who wants to have control over everything», a hyper-present, motivating father, always focused on Tommy’s life and achievementsbeloved, beloved son. So loved that he suffocates under the weight of expectations. From the awareness of the parents, the rebirth can begin. But without new dynamics, nothing changes. And psychiatrists, hospitalizations, drugs, are of little use if there is also no will to change. All the parents of the hospitalized boys and girls carry the same burden, lives devastated by the illness of sons and daughters, who were once perfect children, then the abyss. No one understands, no one knows, no one is aware.
«Growing up also means disappointing»
Disorientation, pain, attempts. Parents searching for the “right” words to communicate, who come up against one failure after another. Parents who, in hospital rooms, recognize each other, different pathologies, the same resignation, fear, sense of guilt. «Growing up also means disappointing». It is difficult to put aside the “self”, one’s expectations, desires, hopes and love a son or daughter only for what he or she really is. “It takes nine months for a child to be born, it only takes a second for a child to die”. Thus, hurting oneself, not eating or gorging oneself until one dies, attempting suicide or destroying oneself with drugs, are the same cry for help, the attempt to disappear to be seen. “Hurt yourself is the first form of control we all have,” one of the doctors tells Tano. The iron control over them that adolescents who hurt themselves have is often the only way to put themselves back at the center, change the pace, dictate new rules, modify the relationship with their parents. A tough book that tackles a contemporary drama without discounts: the suffering of adolescents and the inadequacy of their parents.
