Wednesday, April 22, 2009

WELCOME TO HOLLAND


It's been a while since posting here: mainly due to a building program at our place - a retreat-place for Urban Neighbours of Hope workers - and involvement in the 'Dawn Rowan Saga'.

Bella is as delightful as ever - loving, smiling (more than our four children and other five grandchildren all put together). She's now almost perfectly 'toilet trained' (which after the first few successful attempts she announced with 'I've done a Millie!'). She now knows the letters of the alphabet, and can match them up...

And Millie is a serious little school-girl who went back after holidays today in her winter uniform. Millie knows some of her favourite stories off by heart (and pretends to read them, when I'm sharing these with her !). She recently represented her grade in saying a prayer in front of the whole school.

This very timely piece of writing (below) addresses a common need: for parents and carers to adjust to the challenging task of raising a child with a disability.

Rowland Croucher, April 2009

*****

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

http://www.our-kids.org/Archives/Holland.html