One year ago my entire world changed…I learned that the child I carried would come into the world as a Little Person, and stay that way. 🙂 Shortly after finding this out I came across the following essay written as a parent of a child with a disability and it struck such a deep chord in me I want to share it with you here.
WELCOME TO HOLLAND
by Emily Perl Kingsley.
c1987 by Emily Perl Kingsley. All rights reserved
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.
This captures my feelings so well, it’s hard to build on but I’m going to try. I really did plan my ‘trip to Italy’. Kids were always part of my picture, and we planned, dreamed, hoped and imagined what our life would be like. We talked about who our kids would look like and what we would do with them. When this news hit us it was like the fragile image of that future just shattered in front of us.
At first you really do have to take some time to mourn that lost ‘trip to Italy’ and I did that. Luckily we had a few weeks before Ronan was born to process the information and do a lot of that mourning. This was a blessing for us, for me especially, having never held him in my arms or even known that he was a boy made it easier to let that imaginary child go.
Once he was born, we saw his face and held him in our arms there was no more question of whether or not this was supposed to happen to us. I know that God chose us to be his parents for a reason. I don’t know if we’ll ever truly understand what that reason is but that doesn’t really matter. Ronan is our son and we are his parents. How tall or short we are won’t take away from the love we have for each other.
In the past year we have had some ups and downs, as any parent would probably tell you with a new baby, but fortunately for us we have had a LOT more ups. Ronan has shared so many smiles, giggles, snuggles and silly moments with us. It has been really fun. Perfect strangers will stop us on the street and tell us how beautiful he is, or what gorgeous eyes he has…all things we see too, but it’s nice to hear from others. The woman who cares for Ronan while Rob and I are at work tells us all the time what an easy baby he is. It warms my heart to see his face light up when we get to her house in the mornings. I can already tell that he loves and trusts her. We have attended a couple LP events, a movie premiere for the new Oz movie, and the Closing Ceremony for The World Dwarf Games and have been welcomed with open arms. I look forward to joining our local chapter of the Little People of America (LPA) organization and get to know our local LP community better.
Ronan had some developmental delays by around six months but he started working with our Early On Intervention team then and over the last couple months has made huge advances in his development. We are starting physical therapy for him this month as well so hopefully he will see positive results with that too!
All in all we are adjusting well to life ‘in Holland’ and I look forward to appreciating the scenery as we continue to settle in here.
TALL & small 