This article on Loredana Vanini is part of the series «Mothers, exceptional stories of women like us». If you want to tell us your experience, write to us here
«My daughter wasn’t even two months old when she underwent the first operation. The doctors were pessimistic, I was strangely calm. A few days earlier I had bought her a gorgeous dress. I thought: I’ll bury her with that, and then I’ll kill myself».
It was the meteor of an evening, evaporated like a comet upon the announcement that, instead, Olivia had made it. She had survived the surgery. Like the one after that, and the one after that. The little girl’s strength soon became the mother’s strength: “I understood that I had to fight for her.”
In reality, Loredana Vanini, Roman, 48 years old, influencer and photographer, had started fighting for her some time ago. Since before her daughter was born. During a ship trip, she sees a sleeping mother hugging her baby and thinks that he would have been very beautiful. He didn’t know that it would also be very difficult for her. At 34 years old, fresh from her marriage to Leonardo, the head electrician at the cinema, she goes for a check-up at the gynecologist because she has an irregular cycle. The diagnosis is ruthless: early menopause. «I start a race against time: I make five attempts at Pma (Medically assisted procreationed.) one after the other, they all go badly. At a certain point she got pregnant naturally but, at the ninth week, the pregnancy ended. I decide to stop too.”
Loredana Vanini, 48 years old, Roman, photographer, activist and influencer on the topic of Pma.
Two years pass in which Loredana tries to live without a child: she throws herself into work, travel, dinners with friends. She finds herself again. «I realized that “the child who wasn’t there” was taking everything: every saving, because an attempt at artificial insemination can cost up to 8-9 thousand euros; every pleasure, because in order to get pregnant I had eliminated cigarettes, wine, a lot of foods and even sport, which is too harmful; every free minute, because if I wasn’t working I went to meet new doctors, visit new clinics, search for new hopes. The child who wasn’t there was also taking away my every smile, because all it took was for a friend to wave an ultrasound to make me lose my good mood. At a certain point I said enough: I didn’t want infertility to shape my whole life.”
And he also wanted to stop being ashamed of it: «It’s an illness, the WHO says so, not a fault, even if many people make you feel guilty. When I started talking about my difficulties in getting pregnant, I came up against the worst prejudices and the most banal clichés: from the classic “you’ve had fun so far, huh?” to the cruel “if God doesn’t send you a child, there will be a reason” to the paternalistic “don’t get angry”. But mine wasn’t obstinate! Desire perhaps?
Tags: Loredana Vanini death daughter wanted mother
