"Welcome to Holland"

By Emily Perl Kingsley, 1987.  All rights reserved.

When you have a baby with Down’s Syndrome it’s like you are planning a holiday to Italy. You are all excited. You get a whole lot of guidebooks and you learn a few phrases in Italian so you can get around. When the time comes, you pack your bags and head for the airport.

Only when you land the stewardess says, “Welcome to Holland.”

You look at each other in disbelief and shock and say “ Holland what are you talking about we wanted to go to Italy.”

But they explain that there has been a change of plan and you have landed in Holland where you must stay.

But I don’t know anything about Holland! I don’t want to stay.

But you do stay, you go out and buy some new guide books. You learn some new phrases and you meet people you never knew existed.

The important thing is that you are not in a filthy, plague-infested slum full of pestilence and famine. You are simply in a different place than you planned. It is slower paced than Italy, and less flashy than Italy, but after you have been there a little while and you have a chance to catch your breath, you begin to discover that Holland has tulips, Holland has windmills, Holland has Rembrants.

But everyone else you know is busy coming and going to Italy. They are all bragging about what a great time they had there, and for the rest of your life you will say “yes, that’s were I was going, that’s what I’d planned”.

The pain of that will never ever go away.

You have to accept that pain because the loss of that dream, the loss of that plan, is a very, very significant loss. But if you spend your life mourning the fact that you did not get to Italy, you will never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things about Holland.