Sonia Bruganelli, Paolo Bonolis’ ex, a few days ago on Instagram spoke about her first-born daughter Silvia and her illness. «You always knew that I would be able to become the mother you deserved to have. Thank you for loving me even when I didn’t,” wrote the producer of Sdl 2005, the company that now handles the casting of I sing. And in an interview given to Corriere della Sera she explains: «By now I have accepted that I am an imperfect mother and that’s okay. Silvia, however, has always loved me. As I wrote, even when I was the one who didn’t love myself, I felt responsible for her limitations, which her other brothers didn’t have. And instead, right from the start, when she was very little, when she saw me sad she would stretch out her arm and point to my eye, as if to ask: why are you crying?
Silvia’s illness
Sonia explains that she understood that Silvia was ill when she was seven years old: «It was her brother Davide’s birthday, there were many children, entertainment, a lot of movement, and she was there, beautiful, but she didn’t have the same speed as the others, he couldn’t run and play with them. I felt a strong pain, yet I felt the need to stop that moment.” And she adds: «I have made a long journey, which I am still making, to accept the situation and begin to enjoy Silvia’s motherhood without pretending to also be a teacher, physiotherapist, speech therapist for her… I should never have made mistakes. For a long time I dealt with the sense of guilt and anger.” Bruganelli explains that he has always experienced Silvia’s illness as «an injustice. I discovered that she had a heart condition in the eighth month of pregnancy, when the clothes are prepared and the bedroom is painted. It should have been the most beautiful moment and instead the doctors told me directly: “If you don’t have surgery as soon as you’re born, you’ll die”.
Heart disease
Silvia Bonolis was born on December 23, 2002. Immediately after giving birth she underwent heart surgery. But the postoperative hypoxia still caused damage that was discovered by doctors after a week. «I had already understood that something was wrong, but everyone said that I was seeing things that weren’t there», Silvia says. «I had a breakdown: I was 27 years old, she was my first daughter, I hadn’t done anything wrong during the gestation, I had been careful. Paolo was 40 years old and had broader shoulders, he took care of everything. I have the first photo with Silvia when she was three months old: before that she had always been in the neonatal intensive care unit.” She also says she is no longer a believer: «I’m sorry, I don’t see the plan, and in fact afterwards I moved away from the faith. If there was a lesson, I would have preferred to learn it on my own skin, not on that of a defenseless newborn.”
Non-self-sufficiency
Today Silvia «is almost 22 years old, I would like her to go and have fun in the evening and have an aperitif with her friends… Her fixed thought is about the future, because she is not yet self-sufficient and will always need someone to help her. But I also think that she will never be alone, because she has four brothers (in addition to Davide and Adele, with Bonolis, there are his two previous children, Stefano and Martina; ed.). Whoever will take care of her will have the financial resources to ensure that she doesn’t lack anything, and this is a great fortune in the face of misfortune”, reveals her mother. Meanwhile the girl “starts having aperitifs, she does hippotherapy, we are giving a lot of importance to her physical and motor independence, to the perception she has of herself, to her self-esteem”.
The break up
The separation with Paolo Bonolis had no impact: «She is our trait d’union. Now I’m much closer to her than when we lived in the same apartment, me and her father upstairs and she with her brothers below her.” Finally, Bruganelli confirms that the decision to end the relationship with her partner «is certainly something that I wanted to define myself, because I wanted to follow my growth. But leaving doesn’t mean abandoning: it also means leaving the other free to be happy without you. In our case there were no betrayals, I understand that for some we could have continued to be together. But I met Paolo at 23, we were together for 26: people change and I have changed more.”
