- WELCOME TO HOLLAND -

Welcome To Holland

By Emily Perl Kingsley

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I'm often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability - to try to help people who've not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it'd feel. It's like this......

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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 & 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 & off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in & 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 & there you must stay. The important thing's that they haven't taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine & disease. It's just a different place. So you must go out & buy new guide books. You must learn a whole new language. You'll meet a whole new group of people you'd 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 & you catch your breath, you look around & you begin to notice that Holland has windmills & Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandt's. Everyone you knows busy coming & going from Italy & they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there & for the rest of your life, you'll say "Yes, that's where I was supposed to go. That's what I'd planned." The pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away because the loss of that dream's 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.

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©1987 by Emily Perl Kingsley. All rights reserved.