Discovering your child has a disability is a life changing moment.
Rewind to my pre-family life, I was a young twenty something attending Fordham University at Lincoln Center. I was a graduate student working towards my M.S.Ed. I was hopeful I would be able to make a difference in the lives of children with disabilities. My Developmental Psychology professor assigned the prominent essay “Welcome to Holland” as part of our required reading. The words of Emily Kingsley made an impact on me as a young adult without a family of my own. I was grateful to have such a wonderful story to pass on to my prospective clients. However, the moral of this beautiful essay had yet to truly make its mark on me.
Fast forward to my life as a mother to four children…fast forward to my life as a mother of a child with an invisible disability…This is when I truly grasped the meaning behind these words. Life will inevitably throw us curve balls time and time again. We may even stumble and fall sometimes. But it is how we perceive these moments and how we rise above our circumstances that allow us to grow as human beings. Some of the most transforming moments in our lives happen when we are pushed beyond our limits. Life is all about the journey, embrace your journey and do everything in your power to make it the best it can be!
“Welcome to Holland” is an prominent essay, written in 1987 by American author and social activist Emily Perl Kingsley, about having a child with a disability.
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 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.
c1987 by Emily Perl Kingsley. All rights reserved.