My Rembrandt

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 guide books and make your 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 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 guide books. 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 may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things ... about Holland.

I revisit this poem because it reminds me that it is ok to be disappointed.
It's ok to wish that I was with everyone else beebopping around Italy.
It's ok to want to smack those who complain about a layover they had on the luxury jet or their sunburn from the beach or their hangover from too much wine... you poor thing.
And... It is ok to admit that Holland was not my choice.

It is NOT ok, however, to act like I may have at 15 years old, pouting because my friends were responsibly and legally relaxing in Panama City, FL while my parents had the nerve to take us on a family ski trip to Utah.
I will try not miss the beauty on this hypothetical family vacation, consumed in my own sulking and self-pity.
This time I will smell the tulips, I will visit the windmills, and I will stare, in awe, at The Rembrandts, no matter how much I don't really get them.
It gives me peace to know that it I am not expected to understand.
​I am just expected to appreciate.