by Maria Luisa Agnese and Greta Sclaunich
Two daughters at a very young age, separation from her husband. The most famous divorce lawyer in Italy tells her story: «I used to put them in front of the TV. I still have guilt. Today men make up 70% of my clients: the women I meet are domineering, arrogant and cunning”
Extremely feared and aggressive as a family lawyer (“I know they say I’m a witch”), Anna Maria Bernardini de Pace has a history of being a full-time mother of two much-loved daughters: she talks about her primary maternal vocation in the house in Ameglia, province of La Spezia, built between the forest and the sea, home to one of its offices. They spent the first lockdown here, all together with their daughters and grandchildren: «Many families in the same conditions fell apart, for me it was the most beautiful period of my life. There were nine of us and we even slaughtered each other, but I would have kept them there forever.”
She became a mother at a very young age.
«I got pregnant at 22 and Francesca was born when I had just turned 23. With my husband it was great love, perhaps the only true love of my life, even if I had many. I was so in love that, despite being very free and very bossy, I put myself in his hands with the plan of having 12 children.”
Agnese: So, despite being the public woman that everyone knows, she did not suffer from that ambivalence between motherhood and career that many girls feel today.
“Absolutely no. Ever since I met my husband, at university because he was my professor, my dream immediately was to get married to him and I did it exactly 9 months later. Leaving university, and with joy, because he asked me to.”
Sclaunich: So she was ready to just be a mom?
«I wanted to be a mother all my life. My daughters were absolutely the greatest thrill I’ve had. Both pregnancies, even if difficult, and childbirth. I introduced standing birth at Macedonio Melloni, with the mother attached to the bed rails and the baby made to get out, with the midwives shouting because then only lying down births were possible.”
Sclaunich: There is a common thread in her life, I think: she always trusted her instincts a lot.
«Always, even now that I am 75 years old. I am convinced that we women have in our gut – because our decisions are made in our gut – a power greater than that of our brain.”
Sclaunich: When you’re pregnant everyone says «you have to do this and that», but they also say «follow your instinct».
«No one gave me many rules. Perhaps because my experience of motherhood began when I was little: I was the eldest with three male brothers, my mother taught and left early in the morning to go to school, we lived in Chiavenna, in Valtellina, where my father was a magistrate, and he too he left at 8.30. Since I was five I took my brothers to nursery. Of course, in a town where we all knew each other it was easier, even if my father had already taught me to read because I had to know how to cope on the street.”
Agnese: She grew up with motherhood built in.
«Yes, my brothers are more my children than my mother’s. When I was finally able to have my daughters it was an explosion of joy from the moment I found out I was pregnant.”
Agnese: What if, with this propensity for motherhood, she hadn’t been able to have children?
«I never contemplated it. But I have been a lawyer for 40 years and I have treated all the trainees I have had, more than four hundred, like daughters and sons. So I also have a sense of non-biological motherhood. For me it’s normal to be like this, I know I could never be a politician. For example, I find Giorgia Meloni the true non-toxic feminist because she puts herself on the level of men: I appreciate her for this, I would never be capable of it but I find it a strength that she is like this.”
Agnese: Are you sure that could be the model for women?
«I don’t know, but I admire her for this. To be an exaggerated mother, I spent 5 years with a Jungian psychoanalyst, who told me that I was wrong to get too involved. I went because my job deals with family pain and I could no longer distinguish the clients’ pain from my own. I chose a Jungian because I had always read Jung as producing beneficial aspects for the future, rather than as Freud investigating the evil aspects of the past. And she immediately noticed in me this exaggerated expression of motherhood, even if I stopped when love ended. For me, it is from love that children must be born and it is with love that they must grow. So much so that I tell my clients: you adults pay me, but I defend your children, not you. I’ve dumped a lot of clients by giving up the mandate because they didn’t respect their children.”
Agnese: Did it go like this in the Totti case?
“It happened like this because there were too many people around, and I’m a bully and I wanted to command.”
Sclaunich: He said that today he is more willing to defend men because they are the weaker sex.
«Today they are the victims. When I started dealing with family law, in 1987, women were the weak party: they were treated at every social level like luxury babysitters. Even the allowance they were given was ridiculous so at the end of the 1980s I developed the concept of standard of living which unfortunately last year the Supreme Court eliminated. But in the meantime women have caught up with men in economic capacity and therefore it makes no sense for them to be rewarded with something they can do on their own. Now I have to protect the weak part: right now I have 70 percent men as my clients because you have no idea what women have become. Bullies, arrogant, cunning.”
Sclaunich: Did you reach the top of your career and achievement without giving up anything in the end?
«I gave up a lot because when I separated from my husband it was a great pain, I would never have wanted to steal the family from my daughters. But I said to myself: I am an example for these girls, who were around ten years old, they cannot grow up with me who accept everything to stay married. I was a great feminist because I fought, I went to demonstrate with Pannella, I did strong things for those years.”
Agnese: But with that strong maternal sense, how did you manage to let them go then?
«It still costs me today, every time they leave I feel bad. I was only a mother until they were ten years old: I breastfed them until they were almost a year old, I raised them and I was always with them. Unfortunately my husband was absent as a father and this was one of the reasons for the separation.”
Agnese: What kind of mothers are your daughters?
«I always pretended that I had been a good and capable mother, my myth was the French psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto who explains how one should be in an equal position with children while still having the severity of commands and rules. But around the age of 17-18 my daughters became wild: disco, travel… I said no, but they always found a way to get out of it: I thought they would never get married and want to start a family. Instead they then became mothers that I swear to you, when I think that when I started working again I did what shouldn’t be done: I left them alone at home, as minors… And I was ashamed to death.”
Sclaunich: If you could go back, is there anything you would do differently to manage the balance between work and daughters?
«I would spend more with them. I still feel guilty for leaving them alone, when I went back to work I had no one to help me. On Sundays I took my work home and placed them in front of the television in another room.”
Agnese: What does your Jungian psychologist say?
«That I was crazy but since everything turned out well, I have to be happy».
Sclaunich: You mentioned guilt earlier. I haven’t met a mom yet, including myself, who doesn’t have it. But do dads have it?
“Yes, they have it, not towards themselves but towards their children: I have examples.”
Agnese: You who are a libertarian, who fought battles with Pannella, what do you think about surrogacy?
«I am against it, in the interests of the child: it horrifies me that a child is raised in a womb and then goes to the other side of the world, even more so if he maintains a relationship with the original mother. I would like to change the possibility of adopting in Italy, which is managed in a shameful way when instead there is the possibility of giving birth and leaving the child in hospital: it should be possible to adopt immediately there alone, giving singles and couples the opportunity too homoparental. For me, love has no sex and must not be contaminated by the idea of the couple in the nativity scene. Love is love. You don’t know how many mothers there are who don’t love, it’s not true that a mother has love as an instinct.”
Sclaunich: So what makes a woman a mother?
«The responsibility of being one. Responsibility comes from the Latin responsum, therefore answer: the answer to life and if you don’t give it to him, a child is unhappy forever. I think of the mothers who don’t follow them, who never say no just to get them away. All the no’s I said to my daughters felt like a blow to my liver, but I did it to make them know the limits.”
Sclaunich: Don’t they remember these? Do they thank you for telling them?
«They don’t thank me, but they are still saying no to their children. For example, they crucified me because they wanted the scooter and now someone is fighting the same way. On the other hand, I always gave him sweets even if it wasn’t supposed to be a systematic thing. I had my own way of spoiling them, because I in turn had not been spoiled: my parents had been absent, my mother had preferred a career, becoming one of the first women lawyers and we children went to boarding school. Today I am happy to give my daughters everything they want, also because when I separated we were poor: if they invited me to lunch I asked if I could bring them too so at least we could eat meat.”
Sclaunich: I didn’t imagine it was like this! Very often we women follow examples of male leadership, I was pleased to discover that you can also be a leader by putting forward your feminine characteristics, including maternal ones.
«Just think that I never cook, I often eat in restaurants. But if my daughters are there I start cooking and no one will imagine that while I’m on the phone for work I’m preparing ragù for everyone.”
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
November 4, 2023 (modified November 4, 2023 | 1:16 pm)
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
2023-11-04 12:17:22
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