Francesca tells us how her desire for motherhood accompanied her through all the stages of her life, up until an unsuccessful pregnancy.
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FRANCESCA N: «I cannot say that I made a firm decision on this matter, or rather in each phase of my life I had a different thought about it. When I was 20, I wanted seven children, at 30, I didn’t want any, when I reached 40, I thought that maybe yes, it could be something I wanted and I also gave it a try, but a sequence of events soon made me realise that maybe it was not the right path for me. Today I am… maybe not exactly happy that in the end children did not come, but somehow relieved, relieved because I don’t know to what extent I wanted to put myself out there for another person, in relation with society, in relation with politics, for example. When I got pregnant, in those months when I was contemplating the idea of no longer being alone in the world anymore, I was angry, I was angry because I had to think again, for example, about politics and the way the world works in relation, for example to school. And I felt kind of obliged to take care of things that I didn’t know whether I really wanted to deal with anymore.
Now if I have to think about the pros and cons of this situation, which I think by now it is pretty much definitive, of being childfree; maybe sometimes I am a bit concerned about my old age, because you start thinking that you will end up alone. At the same time I think that everything, everything has taken a different path now, I know I have to think only about my own future, I don’t need to build something extraordinary for someone else, I need to be happy about each and every day of my life, because I feel I have a duty towards myself only, to ensure myself well-being and peace of mind. Towards myself and of course also towards the others close to me, my own community.
I am actually very maternal, I like to invite people over for a meal, I like to take care of people I love, somehow I have many ‘children’ scattered around, whom I take care of with great care which may seem overwhelming coming from a friend.
During the three, four months my pregnancy lasted, I was always pissed off: first, because I thought women with children were liars, because they all said: “ah it’s great”! From the first moment you expect a child, you feel a whole new being’. I was furious, furious because I absolutely could not come to terms with this thing growing inside me, and I could not understand the weight it could have on my life, also in relation with the outside world. All of a sudden, I had to to face things I had removed from my life, such as Minister Gelmini and the laws they were introducing at the time on public education. Suddenly I had to find myself dealing again with things I did not like at all. Then, I no longer needed to deal with them. My “community” of course did not judge me for not having children. I don’t feel judged as an empty nest or as having chosen a selfish path, choosing for myself only, because of course my people remember that I have tried it, at least. I have, however, towards myself, a feeling that I absolutely do not want to call failure, but it is… suddenly not being able to carry on those pregnancies, I saw myself from a different light, as I realised that I was not Wonder Woman. Because I expected myself to be Wonder Woman: in my head, I had to have a child as if nothing had happened, that is finding myself the next day with a tiny creature running around me, possibly giving birth in just a couple of hours, without having any nausea and without a real revolution of my life because of the child.
Now I have this idea of being fallible but not failing, of being vulnerable anyway because my body did not support me at a time when things were happening inside it anyway. But it made me see that there are boundaries, which is actually giving me a greater awareness of who I am, of my own strength, and of the strengths I can count on.
When I was in hospital I had some meetings, with my gynecologist who claimed that in any case, as in the past, women could have 9 children but with at least 14, 15 pregnancies; she tended to give me hope, encouraging me to try again. It’s just that now we learn we are expecting a child much earlier, therefore we also realise when we loose them, which did not happen before. On the one hand, this is the caring part of medicine for an event like the one that happened to me. In reality, then nurses and other doctors, whom I met when I went for my abortion, helped experience it in a very naturally way, as if could equally happen or not. Moreover, in my same ward there were women who had lost their child at a much later stage in their pregnancy. Anyway, you fell you belong to a different group of women from those you see walking to the children’s park round the corner.
Yes, the story with my dog is also odd. I have wanted a dog for a long time and she arrived. She found me, I was on holiday trying to recover from the shock after this unsuccessful pregnancy. A two-month-old creature of this size arrived and settled down in the hole I had in my heart, bringing me, in reality, a great sense of wellbeing. I have a very maternal attitude also towards my dog, I am criticised for this perhaps, there I feel the criticism from my own community, but I do not consider this dog a replacement for the love I would have given to a child. When I was a kid, I liked teddy bears, instead now I have a cute dog around me that looks like me.
Come here, sweetie! Come! Hup! Nora! Come on… Cutie… Stretch out. Come here to mom! Up you go! Yes… Come on, come closer. Come here. Come here. Here she comes. Not bad, right?
I have different relationships with my friends’ children, in the sense that I choose and I feel totally authorised to do so, I consider the children around me to be people, some I like, some I don’t. There are children to whom I choose to pass on a part of myself, a part of my life. For example, there is a child I like to spend time with, when I am in the country, working and doing things, It gives me satisfaction because he helps me, he tries to understand what I do, but I consider it more like a relationship with an adult, more than a parent-child one. As I mentioned before, I tend to be very maternal in my relationships with everyone, whether they are children or adults; I choose, as if they were all adults, because I feel justified in doing so. I get easily annoyed: if a child gets on my nerves, I simply walk away. I claim the freedom I have in my current state, I do not feel obliged to endure anything just because it’s a child.
My mother was extraordinary, I would have liked, in order to be a good person, to follow her steps, or rather, I believe that my mother has shown the world to be a great person mainly through her being a mother, also because her life’s work was being a mother for us. But I also feel that now she would greatly support my way of being a woman, and a good person. Even when I wonder what my mother would say, if she were still here or how much my mother would have suffered because I had no children, it is not a thought that upsets me that much, because she was an intelligent woman who would have always supported my personal growth. Whether or not I had children, the joy of grandchildren, maybe not so much. If the grandchildren did not arrive, she would have been able to enjoy my every smile anyway. This is the thing: when I was born, my mother was 42 years old, so all my relatives were much older, I did not have young aunts or young relatives. Whether with or without children, they were all back at being just adults. Their being parents, as when there were children, was, if not totally archived, somehow normalised. There was no longer need to take care of children round the clock, because the children themselves were adults by then. I was the youngest of all my cousins. I must say, my family is very traditional in many respects, but as I never felt particularly judged when I got divorced in my life, which for a Catholic and traditional family could have also been a tragedy, neither did I feel judged, nor my sister, nor my childfree aunt for not having them; it’s life, period.
I’d say 98 percent of the mothers I know, when they became moms they only had one topic in mind. I say 98 percent because I’m taking exactly two out of all those I know. But it’s true, when I met Nora I only talked about her for the first two years. Clearly you communicate what fills your life in that moment, as I get fed up listening about diapers and baby food, probably someone else gets bored when I tell how much I like to go for a walk with my dog at Villa Ada.»
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