By Mary Etta Tubbs, B.A.
Pathways, Inc.
This article is not intended to diagnose, only to provide education to increase public awareness and sensitivity.
This story was given to me many years ago, and I would like to share it with all families who have someone with a disability.
Welcome to Holland
by Emily Perl Kingsley
When you’re going to have a baby, it’s like planning a fabulous vacation to Italy. You buy a bunch of guidebooks about Italy, and make your wonderful plans to see the Coliseum, the Michelangelo David, and the gondolas in Venice. You may even learn some phrases in Italian so you can get around. It’s all so exciting, you can hardly wait.
After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags, and off you go…you’re on your way to Italy. After many hours in the air, the plane lands at its destination. The flight attendant comes in and says, “Ladies and gentlemen, Welcome to Holland!”
“Holland?!?!” you say. “What do you mean, Holland? I signed up to go to Italy! I’m supposed to be in Italy. All of 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. But you know nothing about Holland, and you don’t want to stay. The important thing is that they haven’t taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine, and disease; you are simply in a different place than you had planned.
Since you have no choice, you get off the plane and go out and buy new guidebooks, and you decide to learn a few new phrases in Dutch. You meet a group of people you would never have met, and that you never knew existed. You discover that Holland isn’t a terrible place; it is just a different place. It’s slower-paced than Italy, and 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; 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 you life, you will say, “Yes, that’s where I was supposed to go. That’s what I had planned.”
The loss of the “dream” is a very significant loss, and the pain of that loss will never, ever go away. 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.
Pathways, Inc. is a family mental health clinic that provides relationship, individual & family counseling, psycho-social rehabilitation (PSR), and service coordination. For more information, call 208-878-3350.
