The most beautiful things that have happened to me in life have always been gratuitous and unexpected; not easy, not without effort, but free and unexpected. I have four daughters: my first, Elisa, is a disabled girl in a wheelchair who communicates only through one knee. She does not speak, she needs everything, but what my family and I have experienced is that she has helped us to look at reality as a gift. It really struck me that she never gave up in the face of her desire, first and foremost her desire to be happy. At the end of eighth grade she said, "I want to go to the linguistic high school," and my husband, who is a very realistic person, objected to her, "Eli, you do not speak, do you want to go to a linguistic high school? There are so many other schools, so many other paths in life." She retorted, "I can listen and I can translate." Elisa already had something in mind that she could do with the gifts that the Lord had given her. And so she not only went to a linguistic high school, but she also graduated with a degree in Languages.

During these years, I have understood that the possibility of looking at her only came from undertaking – myself in the first place – a journey, to recognize what it means to belong and that belonging can generate freedom. I struggled a lot when she was little, but I always had friends who told me, "Look at her first of all, and not at your struggle." Let me give an example. When she was at elementary school, her teacher would give her a paper to write every Friday, and she would take two days to write it. So every weekend we had to stay home and wait for her to finish. At the first interview in the fifth grade I said to her teacher, "Can you not reduce some of Elisa’s effort? Because she is at home writing her paper from Friday at 3p.m. until Sunday night." Her teacher looked at me and replied, "Is it her or you who is struggling? This is her way of communicating." I realized that friends are given to me to look at what is happening and how Jesus is revealing himself within the circumstance. In that case, I was looking at the struggle of not going out on the weekend and not at her, not realizing that that was her way of being in reality. Belonging to the movement, following, has always helped me to recognize how Jesus responds in the circumstance.

I never asked my other daughters to help me with Elisa; I never demanded that they feel obliged to help me. Two years ago, one of them, who has not gone to Mass for a long time and is always very critical, said to me, "Can I invite a friend over for dinner with her dad?" I said, "Why do you want to invite her dad too?" "She had a motorcycle accident and is in a wheelchair, she is having a hard time accepting her condition.” When she told me, the first thing that came to my mind was, ‘No, he has to see my parents.'" This fact struck me because I had never said to her "You have to stand in front of Elisa, you have to help her, you have to...," but she carried within her that gaze she had seen.

A few weeks ago, I went with Elisa to the vacation of the Quadrattini, a group of sick people who daily follow Mass online. Rather than sick, I would say that they are people who in the face of reality have an open, wide-open question, who have helped me to become aware of the nature of my real need to intercept what answers and what I need to live. Upon returning, Elisa wrote, "This vacation was really good, first of all because those who guided us were always careful to show us where the Lord was manifesting Himself. I felt tremendously loved, despite all my and our limitations, and I am full of gratitude to God and to you for that."

At the beginning, I looked at my daughter and suffocated in the circumstance. I could say, "Yes, Elisa is good for me," but when I had to feed her, change her and could not go out, it was not enough for me to know that ‘theoretically’ she was a good. In these years, I have had to make a journey in following the movement and in particular Fr. Julián Carrón, to recognize that in reality Jesus does happen again, maybe not in the way I have in mind, but he does happen again, giving me a hundredfold. And this has been evident in the moments of greatest difficulty; I have always had people to look at and from whom I have never detached myself, that is, friends who have never taken away my struggle, but have made me see that: "Reality is Good, because in reality, if you recognize the signs of Jesus, you can see the hundredfold."

Looking at Elisa and the path she had taken, I can say this: the experience of dependence only frees us if we are certain that we are loved. This is evident for Elisa. She is not loved first of all by us, who are poor, but through us she is able to recognise the One who makes her.

Read also – "The most important hour of my life"

The path I have taken by saying yes to the circumstance, which is then the way in which Jesus continually makes himself present, became a witness. One fact comes to mind: during the 2019 European elections, a friend had told me that a journalist friend of his needed to interview a large family with disabled children, and he thought of us. The journalist came and stayed with us from lunch to dinner. Before she left, she said, "But I do not know what to write now, though." "How do you not know what to write?" I retorted. She said, "My article was supposed to be about what troubled families are asking from politics. But being with you, I never sensed a complaint or a lack of anything that can be filled by politics." In the course of the day, she had told me about not having a family and not wanting children for a career. A few years later, I heard back from her to find out how she was doing, and she replied, "I got married and had a baby girl. I have never forgotten meeting you, because it is as if my hope was reborn, I realized that there is something more worth living for."