Holland

It is a relaxed Saturday morning, and as I was getting our sweet Raymond up…the process takes quite awhile to prepare his medications, do his treatments, get his G-tube feeding supplies prepared and so on.  As he was smiling at me, I started thinking of Holland.  Why Holland you ask?  Years ago when Raymond was a baby, we were given this story “Welcome to Holland” to help us understand the new world of having a child with special needs.  We kept this posted on our fridge for a long time….and when something out of the norm would happen…we would just say…well, we are in Holland now.   

But this morning, I was thinking of others who might be experiencing similar feelings because their children or a family member has had to deal with an unexpected disability due to an injury or illness, and they suddenly find themselves in what might feel like a different world.  This story might help one look at the beauties of life that one might not see if they focus on where they wanted to be, rather than where they are……

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 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.”

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 get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things about Holland.