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28 August Welcome to HollandWelcom to Holland (aka The Beauty of Holland)
by Emily Perl Kingsley
I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability - 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 guidebooks and make your wonderful vacation plans. The coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It's all very, 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 flight attendant comes in and say "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 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 guidebooks. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you never would have met.
It's just a different place. It's slower-paces that Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you've been there for awhile and you catch your breath, you look around, and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills. Holland and tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.
But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Itlay, 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 go away, because the loss of that dream is a very significant loss. But if you spend your life mourning the fact that you did'nt get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things about Holland.
I have found Welcome to Holland to be a comforting piece that I may read to remind me of the beauty of things. You could relate it to different situations. Such as someone who is coping with a sudden disability, some one coping with a devasting turn of event in their life no matter the situation. I gave the writing to a friend who had learned that her son was coming out of the closet and was a homsexual.
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引用通告此內容的引用通告是： http://chrisommers.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!51D9CC89305BAC1F!136.trak 引述這則內容的部落格
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