Welcome
to Holland
I am often asked to
describe the experience of raising a child with a disability - to try to
help people understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It’s like this.
. .
When you are going
to have a baby, it’s like planning a fabulous vacation trip - to Italy.
You buy a bunch of guidebooks and make wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The
Michelangelo. David. The gondolas of Venice. You may learn some handy phrases
in Italian. It’s all very exciting.
After months of eager
anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go.
Several hours later the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says,
“Welcome to Holland.”
“Holland?!?”
you say. “What do you mean, Holland? I signed up for Italy! I’m supposed
to be in Italy. All my life I’ve dreamed of going to Italy."
But there’s been a
change in the flight plan. They’ve landed in Holland, and there you must
stay.
The important thing
is that they haven’t taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place,
full of pestilence, famine and disease. It’s just a different place.
So you must go out
and buy new guidebooks. And you must learn a whole new language. And you
will meet a whole new group of people you would have never met.
It’s just a different
place. It’s slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after
you’ve been there for a while and catch your breath, you look around and
you begin to notice that Holland has windmills. Holland has tulips. Holland
even has Rembrandts.
But everyone you know
is busy coming and going from Italy, and they’re all bragging about what
a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will
say, “Yes, that’s where I was supposed to go. That’s what I had planned.”
And the pain of that
will never, ever go away, because the loss of that dream is a very significant
loss.
But if you spend your
life mourning the fact you didn’t get to go to Italy, you may never be
free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things about Holland.
Emily Perl Kingsley
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