Perhaps you’ve read the essay, “Welcome to Holland“, written in 1987 by E. Kingsley, the parent of a child with Down Syndrome, as she tried to explain what “special needs parenting” is like.
I’ve added a link to the original essay, which is an extended metaphor, above. If you want to take the time to read it before continuing onward, feel free. If not, here’s the very short version:
It’s written in the second person. The process of pregnancy/childbirth/parenting is likened to the anticipation/planning/plane ride to Italy, a long desired trip that ‘you’ have been dreaming of… and then getting on the plane and getting diverted at the last minute to Holland. After having an attack of ‘I hate this place’ and being told ‘no backsies, no refunds, no ticket home’, learning to love the beauties of Holland, including wood shoes, windmills, and tulips.
At the time it was written, 34 years ago, no one had even come close to describing what it was like to have a child diagnosed with a disability that would be lifelong. This essay resonated with so many parents. It spread far and wide. Several nonprofits are named after this essay.
If you are someone for whom this essay was helpful, I’m very glad for you.
Now I’m going to offer an unpopular opinion.
I think this metaphor needs to be drowned in a bucket, as soon as possible, if not sooner. (If I thought yelling STAT would get someone to bring me a bucket half filled with water, guess what I’d yell down the hall?)
This is not just because I dislike wooden clogs and wooden ice skates, although the coefficient of friction between wood skates and ice has got to be absurdly high, and splinters in the toes cannot be compensated for by any number of windmills.
Here are the problems that I see with continuing to use the Holland metaphor so widely.
First, the background. To make sense out of new things, we compare what we know — our known frame of reference, our everyday experience– to the new thing. Whatever frame of reference we use? That’s the way of thinking we apply to the new material or experience we want to comprehend.
Human brains use metaphors (the smallest story unit) for making meaning out of new experiences. Metaphors are great for this because they draw attention to what two different domains of experience have in common by focusing on certain similarities.
Here’s the problem. Metaphors only deal with a particular aspect of an experience. They need to be changed, revised, and updated. Unfortunately, when a metaphor really does a good job getting across a point, it becomes more permanent and difficult to change. People take it for granted, and it hangs around, doing more damage than good.
Yeah, Holland. I’m talking about you.
Let me start with my most minor complaint, and work my way up to the offense worthy of The Bucket.
#1. All parenting is like getting on a plane to Italy and getting diverted to Holland and getting told “oopsie, no take backs”.
#2. The emotional shock– the trauma, and the subsequent adjustment and making sense of life as the parent of a child with a disability, be that a GJ tube, autism, dyslexia, bipolar disorder, a trach/vent, or a chromosomal disorder? That’s not like getting off the plane in some other country that uses Euros, even if their footwear doubles as a flotation device and they’re corm-obsessed.
This metaphor deals with the ‘stranger who is unwillingly in a strange land’ aspect of the experience, behaviorally– not emotionally, so much. It is chirpy. Upbeat, almost disconnectedly so, and this is one of the places where this metaphor breaks down.
After all, the author says, Holland isn’t a horrible place. There’s no famine or disease. No kid that’s suicidal, no nonverbal kid screaming in pain and a parent distraught because they don’t know why. No team of specialists hovering and unable to explain why the child’s health is so tenuous. No child with behavior problems or ICU psychosis, no parent filled with fear or grief because they have just been told their child will lose a limb, an eye, an ear, will need skin grafts, might not make it out of the hospital because their birth weight is so low, needs heart surgery right away and unexpectedly.
(Thirty-four years ago, we weren’t saving infants at 22 and sometimes even 21 weeks’ gestation. Our ill children with disabilities who went home were, like their adult counterparts, not as ill as the children and adults discharged from the hospital now.)
#3. Here’s the Bucket Worthy Offense. After singing Holland’s praises as such a clean, famine-free, Rembrandt-inhabited locale, we get a whiplash inducing 180 degree turn in the penultimate sentence:
And the pain of [not going to Italy] will never, ever, ever, ever go away… because the loss of that dream is a very very significant loss.
This is the real danger of Holland. This right here.
The pain will never, ever, ever, ever go away? That’s a choice you can make, sure. You can choose to hold that pain close. You can choose to not process your feelings.
You can choose to cuddle a porcupine, too. Or get a manicure with a blowtorch.
The metaphor– a metaphor that’s gone and made itself semi-permanent in the collective consciousness– fails us here, because it was never designed to deal with the emotional aspects of parenting a child with disabilities from a position of emotional adulthood.
We can attribute our pain to this event. “I lost my dream. That’s what hurts.”
In my opinion, though, it’s telling that story to yourself over and over again– reliving the story of losing your dream, of “not going to Italy”, if you will, over and over again, that makes the pain ‘never, ever, ever, ever go away’. It’s putting the blame on “losing your dream” instead of taking responsibility for your emotional life.
Here’s my suggestion. Let’s drown Holland in the bucket, especially that penultimate line. Let’s each find a metaphor that works for us. And when we feel emotional pain, as adults, let’s name it, process it, and learn the skills we need to find a more resourceful emotional state, and find better dreams
and better places
…than freaking Holland.
