"Welcome to Holland"

I have a friend who is a young widow and who also works with differently-abled children. I shared the book "Expected Adam" with her, it's about a couple whose child is born with Down's syndrome. The parents go from being clueless, to realizing the gifts that Adam brings to their lives. My friend shared with me this short piece which describes the experience of raising a child with Down's Syndrome. It has a lot of parallels to being a young widow - I guess the message being that life doesn't go as planned, but there are always new adventures, there are always new things to learn, there is still happiness to have. To enjoy all these things you just need to keep your eyes and heart open. What a fine way to express that it's "about the journey not the destination...." :)

(P.S. I thought momentarily of trying to write something similar about being a young widow, but then the original author wouldn't have gotten their credit. Plus it had some weird analogy, like your spouse bails out of the airplane over the Atlantic...you'll understand after you read it...)

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WELCOME TO HOLLAND by Emily Perl Kingsley (c) 1987.

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 guide books 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 guide books. 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....and 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, ever go away... because the loss of that dream is 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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