Splendid Mayhem: Irony

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.

Sunday, April 27, 2008

Irony

I ran into WalMart Friday night to grab a few things, mainly stuff to make sure the boys are well fed in the coming week. I stopped by the book isle to pick up a few books to *hopefully* read this week, since I won't be doing much else. I read a book by Elizabeth Flock earlier this year and thought she was a pretty good author. She had 1 other one at Walmart, so I grabbed it. I started reading it yesterday. The name, "But Inside I'm Screaming". Many of you know what's happened in my life in the last week. Well, I'm at a point in this book where she is going through something SOOO, SOOO, SOOO similiar to what I did last weekend. I sat there staring at a certain paragraph and was just thinking, "wow". Is it a good thing for me to continue reading this book or not? I think that maybe God placed this book in my hands for a reason? Does that sound silly? Why else would I grab a book like this one out of the blue. I didn't even read the back of it before I bought it. I started reading it and had no idea what it was about. I just thought it was ironic.