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“Welcome to
Holland”
By Emily Pearl Kingsley
“ I am often asked
to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability to try and 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 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 phrase in Italian.
It’s all very
exciting.
After months of
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 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
new language.
And you will meet a whole new group of people
you may 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 awhile and you can catch your breath, you look around and 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’ve been bragging about 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.”
And the pain of that
will never,
ever, 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,
the very lovely things
about....
Holland.
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