After having finished her work, said goodbye to her colleagues, and answered the messages that arrived during the day, Angela could now go to take the metro. After passing through the turnstiles and waiting for five minutes for the subway, she now sat down and checked the e-mails that had arrived from the court. She absolutely had to buy herself an agenda. She had been telling herself this since the beginning of the month: she just had to find five minutes to stop at a stationery shop and pick out an agenda. Not such an easy task.
She gets off one stop before her place. She strolls, meets the neighbour across the street who waves to her. She finally enters a bookshop. She heads for the cashier’s desk, where you can usually find agendas, as if they were a bygone accessory, which you feel like buying more on a whim than out of necessity, while standing in line. So, at the side of the queue to pay, you start, just with your gaze, to intercept the agendas that are suitable for purchase. Those that are too big are excluded: they are not practical for carrying around and, for her, the agenda must always be at hand. Those too small are overlooked: useless, what is the point of having an agenda if you can only write in monosyllables? She then approaches the other side of the shelf, where she finds a medium-sized diary. Flipping through it, she appreciates the white space covering almost the entire page and the absence of the numbers dictating the hours: she wants to handwrite the times and the places where she has to go. She may have made it, now all she has to do is buy highlighters. She chooses green and yellow, her guys’ favourite colours.
She does a quick calculation: in red, she marks the must-do appointments for her; in purple, the appointments and tasks for the house which is renovating; in orange, the appointments for work; and finally, in yellow and green, everything concerning her kids. For safety reasons, she pulls her old agenda out of her bag and checks that the colours are always the same, so there is no confusion. The shop assistant looks at her with amusement: “I recognise the mothers who have to frame all the appointments!”. Angela smiles. She does not know if she feels like explaining the whole story to her. She does not know if she wants to tell her that she is actually not the biological mother, but their guardian. She does not know whether she wants to tell her that last year more than 20.000 unaccompanied foreign minors arrived here in Italy and that, fortunately, after the law of 2017, one can become a guardian of those children to help them interact with society and integrate into the Italian school system. She does not think she wants to tell her the story of her two guys, of the video calls they make together, when they can, to their families. She does not know if she wants to explain to her all the time wasted in court or at the police station, of the bureaucracy she has to deal with every day. Therefore, she looks at her old agenda: no more appointments, no more colours that stand out in today’s day. Then she has plenty of time. She places her bag on the floor and begins to tell her the whole story. The story of how she is not a mother, but they are, surely, part of the family as children. And so, after wasting about ten minutes with the shop assistant, who surely now knows how it works and what it takes to be guardian of unaccompanied foreigners, she sits down at a bar. And she marks, with all the colours at her disposal, the appointments for the coming days, colouring, entirely, the next Sunday’s page, in yellow and green.
