“Teo is my everything. He is good at making me smile and also at making me cry. The love that he awakened in me is something that I could not have ever imagined. When we got his diagnosis I just wanted a nuclear bomb to drop down and kill us all. Then, you see the desire that your child puts into life and you don’t even want to think about death.
Life is bravery, joy, strength. Teo has everything of that.
Next to his school there is another school for boys and girls without functional diversity and many times, especially on rainy days, many mothers and fathers park in the places reserved for our children … “It’s five minutes”, they tell us, but they do not think about how those five minutes affect our day. Everything in the care of our children takes a lot longer and usually we end up our days feeling exhausted after having to overcome so many obstacles.
Most people don’t see us, or prefer not to see us. Disdain for disability is so embedded, that it’s as if we are nothing, as if we do not exist.
My son, nothing. My time, nothing. Our place, nothing. As much as they put up a traffic sign for us, as much as we are part of a large community that also enters and leaves one school, so close and so far from the other, with their indifference, with their inconsideration, they manage to make us invisible.
I feel cared for by Teo’s dad, by Teo and by our daughter. But I take little care of myself. I always prioritize my children. I don’t know how to ask and I find it difficult to delegate. ” Lola