Welcome to Holland

Hey crikey 2 entries in one day and maybe a 3rd or may leave it until another day...I go on the special needs message boards a lot on AOL and someone was looking for this poem again...Decided to put it in here as it is so inspirational and lovely...The author wrote it about her downs syndrome son but it can apply to anyone with special needs child...When i first read it a few years back on the boards i said i'd landed in antarctica instead...Well we're gradually moving to better climate and one day we might even get there but as you all know i adore my sons to bits and my daughter and don't really care whether we're in holland, antarctica, italy or scotland :o) There is another titled Celebrating Holland and i'll put it here another day

                                         "Welcome to Holland"

                                           By Emile 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 can buy a bunch of guidebooks and make your wonderful plans. The Colosseum the Michelangelo David, the gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian.  Its 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 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 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 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. 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 the rest of your life, you will say "Yes that's where I was supposed to go. That's what I planned".

And the pain of that will never, ever, 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.