Holland also has chocolates.

[lollardfish]

mia_mcdavid used the phase "welcome to Holland" in a very sweet email to us. We didn't get it. My mother, though, got the story in an email from a friend (historian Linda Kerber, interesting woman), who went to highschool with the author. Emily Kingsley helped create Sesame Street and her Downs child appeared on the show from time to time. Anyway ... I /love/ this metaphor.

I speak Italian, ironically enough. Not Dutch.

---

WELCOME TO HOLLAND
by
Emily Perl Kingsley.

c1987 by Emily Perl Kingsley. All rights reserved

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.

Comments

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I've known that story ever since our kids were little, because Kingsley is a writer for Sesame Street, which was a huge part of our lives in those years. She has been responsible for much of the inclusion of people with disabilities on the show.

I think the story is a great metaphor. Using it, I would say that J and I chose to go to Holland, four times--but the fourth time I think we wound up in Transylvania. (You probably don't know us well enough to follow that, but if you want to know more, ask the minnehahas; they have my permission to tell you anything they know.)

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

I can't follow that. I'd like to, in a few weeks. Right now, other people's stories are in some ways not as helpful as I thought they would be. but in a few weeks when we can see over the horizon of the next feeding or pumping.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Oh, of course. I think that the one thing that all new parents have in common, whether their kids arrive by birth or on an airplane, whether the kids have any difficulties or not, is that the new parents have to live in the moment, moment by moment.