I found this article on a blog I follow, Fat Little Legs. The author was very ill with her first pregnancy, and subsequently she lost over 100 lbs. (with Weight Watchers) before attempting the second one. Her second child, Lily the Miracle Girl, was born with Turner Syndrome, and you will learn a lot about that condition there. I commend it to you.
The excerpt below is actually from a reference in a guest post on Little Fat Legs, and I love this metaphor for what it's been like to have a life-changing illness & treatment in the family. We weren't particularly planning an exciting new thing in our lives, but we WERE planning to have 2011 be a certain way. The company would go forward as planned, and my work would, too. We would ride the motorcycle, and visit family, and work in the yard.
Things look different now. We have grown closer, learned to be kinder and to cherish one another regularly. We take nothing for granted. We are learning not to put things off. And we have both learned that we can live through a lot of things we didn't know we could. As AA's How it Works says, if we had been told up front what this would be like, we would have said, "What an order! I can't go through with it!" But here we are.
I found “Welcome to Holland" while I was pregnant with Caroline. The essay was written in 1987 by Emily Perl Kingsley, about having a child with a disability. The piece is given by many organizations to new parents of children with special-needs.
WELCOME TO HOLLAND
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.
Recent Comments