...and when I speak of compassion, in the truest and most etymological sense of the word, I cannot help but think of my children.
Children who bear no guilt, yet today are paying the highest price: that of not having both parents at their side.
But perhaps I am wrong.
Perhaps co-parenting is just a slogan, a convenient label waved in policy guidelines, while in practice it is denied every day, without shame.
Perhaps fatherhood itself is no longer a value, but a disvalue to be eradicated.
Too close to the concept of authority, too difficult to control, too emotionally unpredictable.
Perhaps the father figure has become one of the last obstacles to a social ideal that no longer tolerates authentic relationships, but only fluid, adaptable, neutralized roles.
A society in which human beings, increasingly alone and atomized, must learn not to love too much, not to resist too much, not to think too much. Just obey.
And in this scenario, to be a father — in the deep, emotional, full sense — has become an act of resistance.
And perhaps that is also why I am here today, in a courtroom.
I’m sorry, but I cannot adapt to this model.
I am too old — or perhaps just too clear-sighted — to pretend that all this is normal.
Too stubborn to bow to the new creed that has abolished the words father, mother, bond.
I do not want to become fluid, adaptable, interchangeable. I am a father. A man who has loved, who has built, who has endured.
And if I am here today, it is not to seek understanding. It is to say aloud that I exist, and that I am not ashamed of who I have been.