Wait. . . Where are we now?!

Ok, so as I reminisce on the most memorable moments of parenting for me, so far, I have a LOT of fun and funny things that I want to share here! I thought that before I do that, however, I want to give a little perspective on my parenting view point.

I called this blog “Open Book Parenting” for a reason. My attitude is, the more bluntly honest I can be, the greater the potential for impact on others. At the same time, most parents already know, there isn’t just ONE way to raise a child successfully. Every kids seems to come with their own unique hard-wiring and no matter how blue in the face you want to get about fighting who they are at their core, until you figure out how your kid works and what makes them ‘tic’, the job of raising that kid is going to be 100x harder (just trust me on this one). And, as life seems to love to do to us, as soon as we figure that kid out, they hit another developmental stage and completely change again. And even sometimes, and even harder to handle, once we figure something out, we can’t get anyone else to recognize, accept, or support the new technique or strategy that we’ve just figured out!

Now, I’m hardly an expert on how all of your kid’s work; all I know about are mine, so that’s what I’m going to share. Two of my kids have been diagnosed in their childhood with some difficult to swallow, life altering things and despite my years learning about Early Childhood Development and Education, I am constantly having to re-adjust the way I parent all my kids. Sometimes, it’s hard not to relate my parenting with Multiple Personality Disorder, because of how different my kids are and how different I have to be to help them each. And, then add to that mess my own natural tendencies to do things the way I was raised or would want for ME. (Sigh, yes I said it)

It’s strange how without even knowing it, we have our dreams and desires for what we want our children to become, and then things happen along the way to awaken us to those subconscious expectations we’ve been carrying all along for our children. Learning to let go of our “would have been” and “could have been” ‘s for our kids, whether because of gradual understanding that they are unique individuals or because of a sudden diagnosis, or life changing event(s) can be very heartbreaking. Eventually, however, we all have to face the realization that nothing is going to go exactly (or sometimes, even close) to the way we’ve planned. One of my favorite stories, written by a woman named Emily Pearl Kingsley, illustrates this feeling so perfectly. I would like to share that with you, now:

WELCOME TO HOLLAND, by: Emily Pearl 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, 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 plan 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 guidebooks. 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, 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 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.