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WELCOME TO HOLLAND
"Welcome to Holland" is the best
story we know of the experience of what it is like to have a child with a
disability. It captures the terror and the magnificence of a very
long journey. There is a lot of pain, but there are also a million
little pleasures.
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, 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 of 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 flight
attendant 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
of 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 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 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.
The Dunellen Public
Library dedicates these Disabilities Resources Pages to all the people:
the disabled, their parents, their siblings, their caregivers, their
health-care professionals, and their friends, who find that their lives'
journeys take them to Holland.
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