"Welcome to Holland!"

While looking for something else entirely, I ran across a letter today that we were given during our treacherous NICU days.

The title of this letter is called Welcome to Holland by Emily Kingsley. I remembered one of the NICU nurses gave me this story as it pertained to having a child with special needs. I suppose even then it was obvious the road we were about to embark on, and I think this was the nurses way of providing encouragement. Looking back now, its always most appreciated when a nurse can do more than chart and pass meds, and that is speaking from my own personal experience as a practicing nurse. So often long gone are the days when you can take a more holistic approach and also be concerned about a patients' (or patients family) emotional, mental or spiritual well-being.

I vaguely remember reading this story over two years ago (I'm sure it was during one of the many long, stressful days while sitting next to Jocelyn's incubator). Today, I took a second to re-read this story, and although this mother shares her experience of raising a child with a disability plainly and simply, it contains much truth.

Perhaps several of you other NICU mamas or special needs mamas have also read this story, but for those of you who have not, I thought I would share it with you.

Welcome to Holland!

By Emily 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, the Michalangelo 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 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 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, 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." The pain of that will never 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 will never be free to enjoy the very special, very lovely things about Holland.

Just as Emily proclaims, "Holland" might not be where we thought we would be, but it has the most unexpected beauty!