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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’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 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 guide
books. 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…and 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 you 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, ever, ever go away…because the loss of
that dream is a very, 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.
Copyright
©1987 by
Emily Perl Kingsley - All rights reserved.
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