Well, it's 0300 in the morning and big surprise.....I can't sleep. My nerves have got the best of me. My stomach is in knots. We leave tomorrow for Los Angeles and on Friday Austin and I take off for our journey to Santiago. I have so many emotions now. I am very excited, nervous and scared all at the same time. How can that be? I know this is going to be a great experience and that Austin will gain so much from it, and me too, so why am I so scared? To distract myself, I've been looking through some old papers that I have lying around. I found a poem that often describes our lives and I thought I would share it. It is called Welcome to Holland by Emily Pearl Kingsley.
"I am often asked to describe an 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 guidebooks 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!, All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy."
"But there has been a change in the flight plan. They've landed in Holland, and there you much stay."
The important thing is that they haven't taken you to a horrible, filthy place, full of famine and disease. It's just a different place. So you must buy new guidebooks. 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 a little while, 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."
The pain of that will never, every 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.
This poem is so true. If it hadn't been for Austin, we may never have met some of the wonderful people in our lives that we have now, we may never have gotten the chance to go to another country, like Chile, we may not have experienced the bonding we have as a family, and we would have not had the chance to meet and raise such an inspirational, hard working child like Austin. And Zach is special too in his own ways. He has learned many different things that many six year olds probably don't know. He is a great helper, understanding and caring big brother and son.
I feel many people can relate to this poem in many ways, not just families with a disabled child. It can put a new perspective of the way we think of things. I know it did for Bill and I.
I'll let everyone know when we arrive in Chile. Thanks for all your support. We are very blessed to have such special people in our lives.