Swimming to Italy

Sometime between 15 months and 18 months old, my middle child went silent. When, shortly after, he received a diagnosis of Autism, our pediatrician shared with us the well known essay, “Welcome to Holland.” I’d seen it before. As a teacher, I found it, well, lovely. Touching. I probably re-shared the damn thing on Facebook. After all, it pulled on my heartstrings and helped me “understand” the special-needs-parenting experience. Ha.

Here it is for your enjoyment:

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.

Emily Kingsley.

Now, in my pediatricians office just a few years later, I re-read the essay; but it didn’t bring me peace. I found it patronizing, non-sequitur, and even insulting. At the time, I couldn’t put my finger on the overall ickiness the essay invoked.

I get it now. There are a few things very very wrong here. First, the not so subtle implication that I ended up in a place that I didn’t want to be, that I would learn to accept my son. There was never a millisecond where I was disappointed in my son. I absolutely do not need to learn to appreciate the windmills, the things unique about my beautiful son, because I already do and I always did. Let me say that again, I don’t need to learn to love my son.

The analogy seams to be that we, as special needs parents, didn’t get what we bargained for; but chin up, because what we got is pretty great if we choose to see it. Find me a parent that did get what they bargained for, for whom parenting looks exactly how they thought it would. There’s a reason that those idealistic promises we make ourselves about screen time and junk food go out the window when we actually have our own children. So maybe in a way, we all start out in Holland.

And then there’s the loneliness of the passage about the author’s friends bragging about Italy. Not my friends. I know I’m lucky beyond measure to have such a wonderful tribe, but my friends aren’t bragging about a place I’ll never go. They are pouring me another glass of wine and making sure I’m here (wherever we are together, probably like Amsterdam or something knowing my ilk) enjoying myself. They are teaching their children to appreciate diversity and giving me a hand when I need it. They say it takes a village, and my village certainly isn’t in a different country.

And can we just take a moment to laugh at the absurdity of thinking that this is all somehow “slower paced” and “less flashy?”

After rejecting this essay pretty hard, I’ve come to the conclusion that parenting isn’t the destination, it’s the journey. Because as parents we ALL make it to Italy eventually. Some of us just have to swim.