WELCOME TO HOLLAND
by Emily Perl Kingsley
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.
1 comment:
This is a great analogy, and it can fit for so many life experiences, so I can totally relate. My plans have changed so many times from what I had hoped to happen to what actually happens. The key is acceptance, which is often easier said than done. Whenever you get frustrated or depressed, remember this story. I'm going to borrow it, if that's okay. Tomorrow is the anniversary of Courtney's death, and with that our plans changed drastically. I'm not saying the loss of a child is ever a good thing, but in this process, we learned many lessons that we wouldn't learned any other way. The same can be said of having cancer three times and being in a near fatal car accident. Everything happens for a reason. I have moments when I wish I could go back in time and change things, but what if those changes made everything even worse? So I accept that what I've been given is the lesser of two evils. I hope you can see that too. Love, Cindi
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