Welcome to Holland

This is a very popular passage in the Autism and Special Needs communities.  I start almost every morning reading it, it always seems to put things into perspective:

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.

…..

Except for me, it’s like Spain.  I never had a desire to visit Spain, it was never on my radar…. I had always dreamed of France.  When my husband and I were first dating, he asked me if I wanted to visit Europe with him.  Of course I said, “Yes!” (who wouldn’t?)  The itinerary was to go to London to visit family, go to Paris, and to visit Nerja, Spain.  I wasn’t too excited about Nerja, afterall, it wasn’t Paris.  From the moment we arrived in Spain though, I was in love.  It’s true, it wasn’t Paris – it didn’t have Notre Dame, and the Eiffel Tower, or crepe vendors on the street, or flower markets along the Seine.  But it had beautiful sunsets, and gorgeous cabanas on the beach, and amazing quaint little towns in the Spanish Hills… and it was FUN!  That is what Tristan is to me – he is my light and my joy, and man is he fun.  He has a laugh that absolutely sparkles, and a passion for life that is infectious.  True, we have our rough days, but he has taught me a lot about myself on this journey with him.

I truly believe that Tristan’s diagnosis was really a diagnosis for ALL of us.  It’s not just Tristan that is living with this – it’s me, my husband, his little brother, AND him.  We’re all in this together and it’s a path that we have to walk hand-in-hand, one step at a time, one day at a time.  And it’s a path of hope, not of fear.