When you're going to have a baby, it's like you're planning a vacation to Italy. You are all excited. Seeing the Coliseum...the Michelangelo..the gondolas of Venice. You get a whole bunch of guidebooks. You learn a few phrased in Italian so you can order in restaurants and get around. When it comes time, you excitedly pack your bags, head for the airport, and take off for Italy...only when you land, the stewardess announces "Welcome to Holland."
You look at one another in disbelief and shock saying, "Holland? What are you talking about--Holland? I signed up for Italy!" But they explain that there's been a change of plans and the plane has landed in Holland-- and there you must stay.
"But I don't know anything about Holland! I don't want to stay here", you say. "I never wanted to come to Holland!" "I don't know what to do in Holland and I don't want to learn!" But you do stay. You go out and buy some new guidebooks. You learn some new phrases in a whole new language and you meet people you never knew existed.
But the important thing is that you are not in a filthy, plague-infested slum full of pestilence and famine. You are simply in another place, a different place than you had planned. It's slower paced than Italy; less flashy than Italy; but after you've been there a little while and have had a chance to catch your breath, you begin to discover that Holland has windmills...Holland has tulips...Holland even has Rembrandts.
But everyone else you know is busy coming and going from Italy. And they're all bragging about what a great time they had there. And for the rest of your life you will say, "Yes, that's where I was going, that's where I was supposed to go, that's what I had planned." And the pain of that will never go away.
And you have to accept that pain because the loss of that dream, the loss of that plan is a very significant loss. But if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you will never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things about Holland.
Source: Copyright © 1990 by the American Association on Mental Retardation Lifespan Perspectives on the Family and Disability, Judy O. Berry, Michael L. Hardiman. Allyn & Bacon, Needham Heights, MA, 1998.
