Today is a big day at our office– our new furniture arrives (pictures to follow!). And in the meantime, while cleaning out my desk, I found this beautiful piece which I feel compelled to share.
In 1987, Emily Perl Kingsley penned this essay, Welcome to Holland, which I also pasted below. I vividly remember reading this for the first time very early in my career. I was working in special education as a paraprofessional with grades K-6, about 12 years ago. I had never really been interested in special education– I wanted to be a history teacher, but it was the job I got (and I really needed a job!). Lo and behold, I ended up falling in love with the work. I wanted to understand my students better, and be the best possible advocate I could be for them. Thus, my path to Teachers College, school psychology, and eventually, educational consulting. To this day, I still have the same passion for advocacy and quality of care for “my kids.”
Holland– this is my place.
~Michelle
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 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 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-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 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 go to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things…about Holland.
©1987 BY EMILY PERL KINGSLEY.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.