WELCOME TO HOLLAND
by Emily Perl Kingsley
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 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…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 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.
Welcome to Holland has been one of my favorite pieces of writing since the first time I heard it. It was first read to me by a teacher I worked with at a preschool. She was telling me about her son who was autistic and trying to describe him. I replied, “That must be hard,” and she said the only way she could describe it is by reading this, which happened to be Welcome to Holland. As she read it her eyes filled with tears and I found this piece extremely moving.
I feel that this should be read by aspiring teachers all over to improve their sense of empathy and help them forge some type of understanding of what parents of students with special needs go through. Since classrooms today are including more and more children with special needs it is increasingly important that future teachers develop a level of understanding of these students and their families.
This piece was very beautiful and moving. It is a wonderful way to look at the concept of a disability because many times people focus on all the bad things about a child with disabilities. They forget that these children too are incredible in their own individual ways, and if they focus on all the bad then they will never realize it.
I shared your post with the woman I work for, who has multiple children on the autism spectrum. We were both so moved with the piece. As the comment above talks about, it is so great to see something like this that displays the trials of handling a disability diagnosis, but still “comes out on top” and wholeheartedly expresses that good can still exist. So often we as a society look at disabilities in negative ways, but we need to remember that a child with a disability is still a child first – and has so much to offer and achieve. Thank you for posting this selection!
Hi Emily,
I am an aspiring Special Education teacher. I agree with you that “Going to Holland” is a valuable piece of work that provides professionals, teachers, and others who work with children with special needs and their families a better sense of understanding. My professor of a collaboration course read this aloud to our class. It really gave me a chance to put myself in the parent’s shoes. While, I already empathize for what families with children with disabilities go through, it opened my eyes to how the life changing event initially affects parents. This is definitely a story I will share with general educators, school psychologists, and other professionals and parents I work with in the future.
I also wanted to get your input of how your child’s teachers have supported him/her for the future. I am currently student teaching, and realize that the school I am in does not teach as much self-determination skills to students with disabilities as they should. Does your child know about his/her disability? Does he or her participate in the IEP process? I would really like an unbiased parents opinion.
Thanks : )