We haven’t written our blog in the last few weeks as we were in China. We toured the country and visited our daughter, Emily, who lives and works in China. No matter how often we have said the words “our daughter lives and works in China” (and she has been there 3 years!), it is still hard to believe. She lives in a working-class city in inland China … and from what we can tell, where almost no one speaks English! We are very proud of her and the work she is doing, but have to admit that living in China would not have been a choice either one of us would have made. But then, Emily is not a younger version of us. She is a beautiful woman, who, like all of us, is her own person and makes her own choices. Perhaps one of the most difficult things to do as a parent is to let your child be who they are and not try to force them to be the image of what we think they should be (to be successful).

We think this is also true when we are parenting a child with special needs. Although our special children don’t choose a different path (like Emily), they are on a different path than what we would have chosen for them. We recently saw a quote on Facebook that said, “Sometimes you have to let go of the picture of what you thought life would be like and learn to find joy in the story you are living”. We are usually resistant to sharing quotes and stories (see “Welcome to Holland” below) like this as they often oversimplify what we as parents deal with every day. However, we do agree with the advice that sometimes we need to make a conscious choice to view our lives differently. At some point, (for us it probably took longer than it needed to) we need to pay attention to what we have, not just what we have lost, even though the loss is great. We need to find our new NORMAL. We both can attest to the fact that once we changed our perspective, we were able to see joy and blessings that we hadn’t seen before.

Welcome to Holland

by Emily Pratt 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 guidebooks and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. Michelangelo’s David. The gondolas in Venice. You may even 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 go to Italy.

All my life I’ve dreamed of going to Italy!” However, 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 and disease. It is just a different place. So, you must buy new guidebooks. And learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would have never 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 begin to notice that Holland has windmills. Holland has tulips, Holland even has Rembrandts.

However, 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 is where I was supposed to go. That’s what I had planned.” And, the pain of that will never ever go away, because the loss of that dream is a 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.