Welcome to Holland
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 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 am 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 you must stay. The important thing is that they haven't
taken you to a horrible, filthy place, full of famine and disease.
Its just a different place. So you must 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 otherwise.
Its just a different place; its a slower-paced than Italy, less
flashy than Italy. But after you've been there a little while, 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, 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 Italy, you may never be free to
enjoy the very special, the very lovely things about Holland.
- Emily Perl Kingsley
(As published in "That All May Worship and Serve," July, 2002)
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