Children’s Heart Week Day 6: Welcome to Holland

I have seen this essay shared many times by other heart parents, and parents of children with additional medical needs. It is a beautifully written piece and one which helps describe how I felt when we were first told about our daughter’s heart, and our feelings in the weeks and months following the diagnosis.

 

Me standing by a windmill - "Children's Heart Week Day 6 - Welcome to Holland"

Welcome to Holland (by Emily Perl Kingsley)

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.

 

Jessica looking at a lake with geese

 

 

Today’s charity: The Children’s Heart Federation

Today’s featured charity is the Children’s Heart Federation which helps provide information and advice to families with heart children, and campaigns to increase awareness and improve diagnosis of congenital heart defects. One of their most recent campaigns was to make pulse oximetry screening standard for newborn babies and improve detection of heart defects. It has recently been announced that this is to be rolled out across hospitals in England and Wales. The Children’s Heart Federation is the umbrella body for many other heart charities.

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