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I am often asked
to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability.
To try to help those people who have not shared that unique
experience, to understand it, to imagine how it would feel.
It's like this.
When you are going to have a baby,
it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip - to Italy. You
buy a group 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 flight attendant comes
in and says, "Welcome to Holland."
"HOLLAND??!!", you say. "What do
you mean, Holland? I signed up for Italy. All my life I've dreamed
of going to Italy."
There has been a change in flight
plan. They have landed in Holland and there you must stay.
The important thing is that they
have not 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. Your must learn a whole new language. 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. 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.
Everyone you know is busy coming
and going from Italy, and they're all bragging about what a
wonderful time they have had there. 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
go away, because the loss of that dream is a very significant
loss. If you spend you life mourning that you did not get to
Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the
very lovely things about Holland.
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