Sunshine Stories

I came across a very interesting poem on a website offering comfort
for grieving hearts. The piece was written by a mother who gave birth
to a baby with Down Syndrome. I like it very much because I get to
think that this sorrowful place where I am right now might not be as
bad as it seems. I just have to find my tulips and my windmills!

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 guidebooks and make your wonderful plans.
The Coliseum. Michelangelo’s 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 flight attendant comes 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 inHolland 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 guidebooks.
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

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 go away,
because the loss of that dream is a 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.

— Reprinted in Abigail Van Buren’s Column,
The Arizona Republic, October 2, 2000