If you’re a special needs mummy or daddy you may have heard of the piece of writing ‘Welcome to Holland’.
If you’re not- and you haven’t come across it then it’s a must read- especially if you have friends that have family affected by illness and or special needs. Here it is:
“Welcome to Holland”
By Emily Perl Kingsley, 1987. 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.
The thing that mostly brings me to tears is that my Lauren is so perfect and often she is looked upon by society as though she is not. She has an astounding personality that can lift the most tired soul. She is cheeky and playful and finds joy in so many small and simple things. We grow out of such joy. It’s actually a sad thing. I want to be more like Lauren.
I fully admit that when I was pregnant I dreamt of a slender dark haired daughter who would wear her hair like mine and be sporty like me and we would go running together and be the best of friends. It honestly did feel like I was mourning a loss. I really didn’t ever want Lauren to feel less than, because in no way was that the case. It was just a picture in my head that I had to change.
The lonely thing about it is that not many people end up in Holland and most get to be in Italy. It’s hard to relate and sometimes painful. But I get to learn so much about myself and Jonathan and Lauren that I realise I wouldn’t change her. The world could potentially spoil her and I’m glad I get to keep her innocent and lovely (most of the time).
The same goes for Wyatt but in a slightly different way. I finally let myself imagine that we’d be grandparents one day and as it stands most cf males are infertile. Having children if it ever can happen will be a difficult road for him, and I’m sad that he might not have that opportunity in the same way. There are alternatives I know. I let myself get carried away that I’d get to do a normal childhood with him but some very simple things, again, have to be avoided like farm trips 😦
Although our lives are not slow paced as suggested in the piece above, it’s almost spot on.
I do however, have some very very lovely and very very beautiful and very very priceless gifts here that I believe I wouldn’t have, had we got the normal (if that’s even the right word) life I had envisaged. 
What a weird and wonderful trip we get to take with these little miracles.
A xx
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