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 are 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 Michael Angelo 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 say, "Welcome to Holland."

"Holland?!" you asked. "What do you mean, Holland? I signed up for Italy! All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy." But there's been a change in the flight plan. They've landed on 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 a new guidebooks. And you must learn a whole new language.

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 caught your breath, you begin to look around, and you notice that Holland has windmills, Holland has tulips, Holland even has Rembrandts. But everyone you know is busy coming and going drom Italy and the are all bragging about the wondeful 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 it will never, ever,ever 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.