Welcome to Holland: This one's for you Willy!

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.

Sunday, January 10, 2010

This one's for you Willy!

Complaining
Mark Twain quipped, "Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it." A lot of stuff in life is like the weather; there's nothing much you CAN do except talk about it. Sometimes you're too tired or too low or just too overwhelmed by a bad day to do anything. Maybe tomorrow you can do something, but not today. Complaining was invented for times like these.
We're not required to be noble, suffering martyrs. It's OK to vent. Sometimes when talking it out, we start to hear ourselves and get a little insight into the situation. Sometimes we just let off steam and relieve the pressure of our frustration. We may even give our listener a more realistic picture of what our lives are like.
Complaining is just a way of asking for some acknowledgment of our problems and some reassurance. Surely we deserve that much.
"Changed by a Child" by Barbara Gill

This is also for my dad who doesn't like how the women in our family have to, as he calls it, "hash and re-hash" everything!