Welcome to Holland....

I was watching a programme on TV this evening. It was about children with special needs. The children had been born with Primordial Dwarfism. (It is the rarest type of dwarfism. It results in smaller body size in all stages of life, beginning from before birth. Rarely do the people grow more than 3 feet. It is estimated that there are only 100 individuals in the world with the disorder, 40 of them are in the US.)


One of the mothers talked about a poem that really had helped her deal with the situation, it was called Welcome to Holland. I found the piece on a website for people with children with disabilities. It really touched me and I just want to share it:

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 now 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 for some, the pain of that will never go away... because the loss of that dream is a 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.

I thought this was a beautiful way to describe and explain what it must feel like for a mother who has a disabled child.

I suppose it doesn´t only have to apply to having a disabled child though. I suppose you could apply it to other areas of your life too, to other dreams that were dreamed but never did come to pass. Well, we have a choice. We can live life mourning over those lost dreams, we can live life always asking the question - "what if" OR we can choose to enjoy the lovely things about Holland even though we didn´t plan to go there.