Holland

I've came across this before, and now I think it's a good time to share it with all of you.

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 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 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 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 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 many never be free to enjoy the very special, the
very lovely things about Holland.

::sigh::