Perspectives from Holland: That's Us!

"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.

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

That's Us!

Have you ever been reading an article and thought, "That's me!"? Most people have had this happen at least occasionally, and for me, it seems to happen quite often. Whether it be reading about pregnancy or having a baby with special needs (my topics of choice lately), I often find myself relating to the stories, but today was the most surreal experience ever.

Shortly after Luke was born Patrick went up to base to the Family Readiness Center, an organization on military bases that provides support for whatever situation a family may be facing during a military career, and picked up information for families with a special needs member. There was a brochure published in 2009 that is distributed across the Air Force to families just learning about the services provided to families with special needs. One particular article about deployments caught my eye because there on the page was a picture of me and Patrick...LITERALLY. The picture is of me running into Patrick's arms after he returned home from his deployment in January 2007 that had been published in the Minot Air Force Base newspaper.
Some people might call it a random coincidence, but I call it fate. What are the odds that a picture taken 3 years ago from across the country end up in an Air Force wide brochure created two years after the fact? What the odds that this picture appear in a brochure for families with a special needs members? What are the odds that this particular picture depicting one of the happiest moments of our lives end up in material that we are reading to help create a better life for Luke?Call it what you want.