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.
It’s strange—I haven’t looked at this anecdote for over two years. The original motivation behind a well-intentioned acquaintance sending it to me was to offer some sort of comfort to me and my family—when my daughter was diagnosed with stage 4 metastatic cancer. Now that we’ve had the chance to breath, reset, reformat—reading this makes me think about how I teach. Not only are my kids, but just about every interaction with our clients, our writers a new discovery. We can prepare ourselves with all the scholarly knowledge and practical methods of tutoring writing, but at the end of the day—working with humans leaves us open for radically different experiences each and every time.
The subject of students on the margins—no matter what attribute has placed them there—is a subject that tugs at my soul. I’ve always carried a “spidey-sense” when it came to working through adversity—through junior high and high school, I would often work as a peer tutor in the resource room, volunteer to help students that were out sick or otherwise behind and needed help. A few times a month, my BFF, sister and I would walk to the nursing home down the block from our neighborhood to read to the elderly. I never did it for a badge or extra credit, or even the thought that I would pursue a career in teaching. I just liked to think outside of the box, advocate for the underdog—ultimately share what I’d learned and see the discovery through their eyes. I think that even now, my addiction is to witness the “lightbulb” moment in each of my interactions. I know what it feels like when it happens to me, so to see it in others takes the satisfaction to a whole new level. Just not too far—the white coats will be breaking down the WC doors if I try to taste, smell, or touch the discovery within a client.
There’s always something we can offer any student—it just takes skill in learning what works best for them. So far, I know that because of the life experience I have that there are a few more tools in my bag of tricks. However, the peers I have the pleasure of working with and interacting with on a weekly basis continue to surprise me and offer some pretty incredible alternative methods to keep in storage. I often wonder what our writers think of their experiences with us. The fact that some insist that they work with the same consultant is a testament to the level of quality service, but what about the writers that have worked with different consultants each time? I’d like to hope that because of the diversity in our personalities, writers that have worked with many of us have gained many tools to choose from when tackling an assignment. What I am confident in knowing is that because of the diversity in the clients that I see and experience, in the end, as tutors or consultants, we end up with the most gains.
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