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Welcome to Holland
Parenting a Special Needs Child
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, 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 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 – 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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