Welcome to Holland

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 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 and the stewardess comes on and says, "Welcome to Holland." "HOLLAND?" you say. "What do you mean Holland? I was signed up for Italy! I'm supposed to be in Italy! All of my life I have dreamed of going to Italy!" But there has 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 now you must go out and buy a new guidebook. And you must now learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would otherwise never have met. It's just a different place. It is slower paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you have been here awhile and you catch your breath, you look around and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills, Holland has tulips, and Holland even has Rembrandts.

But everyone you know is 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." The pain of that will never, ever go away because the loss of that dream is very significant. But if you spend your whole life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the special and very lovely things about Holland.