A friend gave this to me several years ago, I thought I would share it with you.
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.
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 guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo. David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. Its all very exciting.
After months of anticipation, the big day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later , your fight lands.
The flight attendent comes and says, “Welcome to Holland”. “Holland”. you say. “What do you mean, Holland: I signed up for 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. You must learn a different language and you will meet a 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 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 has Rembrandts.
But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy, and they’re 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 planned.”
And the pain of that loss 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 may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things about Holland.
by: Emily Pearl Kingsley