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My
older Sister
This
e-mail is a bit long but I’d like to know what you
think about what I’m going to tell…
I have known my sister since I was born. I have shared my
bedroom with her for 24 years but she is still one of the
few people able to surprise me.
Today I have spent almost all the day with her, among other
things Giulio came and visited (the ice-cream was delicious!
Thanks…) and I’d really like to tell you something.
As some of you may remember, weeks ago I wrote a couple
of lines about self-help groups to be used during a conference
in Milan. I was at Livia’s that evening so I wrote
those lines using her PC (that she uses to write her own
personal diary). I saved my writing in a folder which I
hid on the hard-drive, or so I thought. In fact, not only
did she find it (making me realise that she is even better
than I thought in browsing through the hard-drive) but she
has kept reading it lots of times in the last few days.
You should consider now that Livia at the moment hasn’t
got a good “relationship” with DS. I know this
because recently we talked about it and she told me for
example that she doesn’t want to spend her spare time
with other people with DS, and so on.
Surprisingly, she liked reading my writing instead. I don’t
know exactly what has jumped into her mind. She simply said
to Giulio “My brother has spoken about me…”
but I believe that she was pleased to read some positive
expressions towards the syndrome.
There’s
something else. I was playing my piano and she came close
to me and said “mum told me that you split up with
your girlfriend”. It was true, in fact it happened
just some days before and after 8 years I’m single
again. I must say first that I’ve never talked about
my personal stuff with her before, except years before when
I broke up with another girlfriend. This time has been very
different though. She came close to me and said “I
know that you can’t say such things to mum, but I’m
your sister, you can talk with me about that”. I was
taken aback. I never expected something like that.
So I did it and talked about it with her, and her comments,
even if very simple, were quite appropriate.
This is the point.
I
am more and more convinced: the retarded mental development
of people with DS – ALL of them – affects just
the so called “cognitive sphere”. The concept
of “retarded mental development”, from other
points of view (such as interior, spiritual and emotional),
doesn’t make any sense. I know that I’m saying
something open to criticism. Actually, I would like to have
an exchange of ideas with those of you who don’t agree
with me.
Years
ago I read a book whose author was the psychologist Howard
Gardner. He maintained that the concept of “intelligence”
can mean anything and nothing. Even the word “intelligence”
doesn’t mean so much. He said instead that there are
the “intelligences” and he even tried to catalogue
them (mathematical intelligence, kinaesthetic intelligence,
artistic intelligence, and so on). On top of “intelligences”
though, there is the inner being, the core of a person.
This is something absolutely beyond so called mental development.
Alessandro
13
05 2002
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