Welcome to Holland!
by Emily Pearl Kingsley
I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability
- to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand
it, to imagine how it would feel.
It's like this . . . When you're going to have a baby, it's like planning
a fabulous vacation trip - to Italy. You buy a bunch of guidebooks and
make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum, the Michalangelo David, the gondolas
in 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 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 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 never
have 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 you 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." The pain of that will never go away, because the loss of that
dream is a very significant loss. But if you spend your life mourning the
fact that you didn't get to Italy, you will never be free to enjoy the
very special, very lovely things about Holland.
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