“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 planning a fabulous vacation trip to Italy, you buy a bunch of guidebooksand make your wonderful plans. The Colosseum, Michelangelo’s 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. “Welcome to Holland”. “Holland??!!” you say. “What do you mean, Holland? I signed up for Italy! I’m supposed to be in Italy. All of 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 buy new guidebooks. 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, 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 where I had planned.”
” 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.”
(This article by Emily Perl Kingsley)