Rough Day

After an emotional day yesterday, a friend sent me this story. I felt I needed to post it here. Ethan is our Holland.

Welcome to Holland
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 this 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 of 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 that 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 going to and 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 ever, ever 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 may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely
things about Holland.