Need a Little Cry? Keep Reading...

For the fourth time in less than a month, my precious daughter sat perched on an exam room table in the pediatrician's office, getting poked and prodded by the dear doctor whom she adores...whom she has come to see as part of her family. This is not a new scenario.

As my sisters well know, my beautiful child has had a slew of health problems from the time she was born, and while she is now able to go longer stretches in between serious illnesses and complications, it doesn't change the fact that she's a little bit different from other kids her age.

Most people would never know by looking at her--most days, she bounces around, happy as can be, doing many of the things that a regular 3-year-old does during the day. You'd never know that she has a thousand dollars worth of medication coursing through her system at any given moment...that she's shaved yet another year or two off my life expectancy when she momentarily stopped breathing...that I'll take a morning or afternoon or day or week off work to care for her when she's ill and not think twice about making up those hours by working quietly at my computer at 3am when the rest of the house is still and silent.

Most people who know me don't know what it's like to have a child that's a little bit different. I don't mean unique, because of course, all children are unique. I mean different in some way. She's not mentally or physically disabled and I thank God for that (though I wouldn't love her any less if that was the case), but she is not well. I was sitting at my desk here at home, quietly agonizing over what to do for my little girl...agonizing over what I can do to ease her discomfort and make this a bit easier for her, when I remembered something. Last week, a woman I know who has heard me discuss my concerns about my daughter's health said she knew the perfect thing for me to read. She sent it to me and I decided to share...

Welcome to Holland - Emily Pearl 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 guidebooks and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum, Michelangelo’s 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 flight plan. They’ve landed in Holland, and there you must stay.

The most 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 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 awhile and you catch your breath, you look around, and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills, Holland has tulips, Holland 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.”

The pain of that will never, 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 didn’t get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things about Holland.

As published in “That All May Worship and Serve,” July, 2002, as published on the United Church of Christ Disabilities Ministries web site at http://www.uccdm.org/2000/07/21/acceptance-of-your-child-welcome-to-holland/