It may seem strange that a mathematical equation can fully express the feelings that arise behind the choice of adoption. What “Dirac’s equation” is, Emma explains to her mother. It is a formula that “describes the behavior of two systems that at a certain moment have been linked to each other: over time they become like a single system and what happens to one continues to influence the other even if they are light years apart ”.
It is clear how the equation in question is the perfect figure to start a reflection on the experience of adoptive families.
Here is a woman who lives this situation to the full and dramatically after having abandoned her newborn daughter in hospital many years earlier. Not a light decision which does not mean severing a relationship, but requires daily confrontation with an absence.
Over time, in fact, here she is, forcefully protesting her love, and at the same time her pain: “it’s easy to judge women, but no one who doesn’t witness it with their own eyes has any idea of the love that lies behind that choice”. She is talking about herself and all those who in some way have, not shared, but accompanied in closeness his decision.
The story, however, is in two voices, because elsewhere there is another little girl who, alone, is adopted. Once again, the interpretation given follows a singular direction: a “loving and responsible choice: probably, not being able to offer me everything a child needs, she wanted to give me (no, don’t abandon me)”.
And around this gift that is life, but also the set of relationships that support it, the author’s autobiographical narrative clings. She, above all, underlines the overabundance of love that supports the choice of adoption without hiding the asperities that lie in growing up, the questions that emerge, the answers that do not come, because “an adopted child is not a blank page”.
And it is singular that the topic is addressed through those two points of view that at first sight are so opposite and exclusive, yet in some ways converging in the search for a way that puts the life not only of the newborn at the centre, but also of those who support it. welcomes.
A life as a gift
by Claudia Roffino, Barbara Di Clemente
Nine Publishing
9.9 euros
