Welcome to Holland
By Emily Perl Kingsley
When you're having 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. 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 (or days or weeks) later you land. The stewardess says, "Welcome to Holland". Holland? What do you mean Holland? I signed up for Italy! I'm supposed to be going to Italy. But there's been a change in the flight plan. You've landed in Holland and here you must stay. The important thing is they haven't taken you to a horrible, disgusting place. It's just a different place. You get out new guidebooks and you learn a whole new language. You will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met. It's a different place. It's a different place than Italy. After you've been there for a while, you catch your breath, you look around and you begin to notice Holland has windmills, 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, go away, because the loss of that dream is very significant. 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, very lovely things about Holland.
