Welcome to Holland - by Emily Perl 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 are going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous trip to
Italy. You buy a bunch of guidebooks and make your wonderful plans. The
Coliseum, the Michelangelo 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
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 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 the wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life
you will say, "Yes, that is where I was supposed to go. That is what I had
planned".
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 that you
didn't go to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, very
lovely things about Holland.
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