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.

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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 Michalangelo 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 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 go out and buy new guidebooks. 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, 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
what I had planned." The pain of that 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 will never
be free to enjoy the very special, very lovely things about Holland.

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c1987 by Emily Perl Kingsley. All rights reserved