As a soccer fanatic this would no doubt be a great game but Italy and Holland have very different meanings in this story. Emily Perl Kingsley’s famous essay about ending up in Holland is a perfect way to explain how this story begins.

“WELCOME TO HOLLAND

by
 Emily Perl Kingsley. c1987 by Emily Perl Kingsley. All rights reserved

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.”

In life there are always expectations and when they don’t quite get fulfilled we are sometimes left feeling angry, resentful of those who got what we wanted and mad at those who win when we lose. When you think of life as a soccer game, being on the losing team, should it be Holland, is not a bad thing at all. It would be a great blessing to be part of that team than not to be there at all. That is the perspective you have to keep in navigating through life with an autistic child. You may not be on the perfect team or the team that wins a lot of big games but you are very much in the game. You need to focus on the abilities of your team and celebrate them every chance you get.