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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 try 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, Michelangelo's 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 and buy new guidebooks. And you must learn a whole new different language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would have never 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 begin to notice that Holland has windmills, Holland has tulips, and Holland even has Rembrandts. But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy, and they are all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say, " Yes, that is where I was supposed to go. That is 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 whole life mourning the fact that you didn't get to go to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things about Holland!