Tulips

Tulips are my favorite kind of flower.  Not just because I think they are really pretty, but because they mean a lot to me.  I have always loved them.  Troy and I had a spring wedding (May 18) and so I chose tulips as the flowers for our wedding.  I carried all white tulips and my bridesmaids carried bunches of pink and purple tulips.  Here we are on my wedding day.....all of us with our tulips. (As I held them that day, I had no idea how much they would come to mean to me in the future).

Because I love tulips and because they were the flowers for our wedding, I love having them planted at our house.  When you walk out our front door right now, you are greeted by tulips....pink and purple, just like at  our wedding.

After Ashlyn was born, lots of people began asking me if I had read the poem, "Welcome to Holland."  I actually had read it before at some point in my life and was also given a copy of it while Ashlyn was in the NICU.  It is really beautiful.....

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.

When we brought Ashlyn home from the hospital it took me many weeks to be able to sit down and read that poem.  People were sending it to me in email attachments and I had the copy from the hospital.  I remember when I did finally read it, I cried hot tears over the whole thing.  Mainly because of how much I wanted to be in Italy.  I had already been to Italy once with my first child and I really thought I couldn't be happy anywhere else. 

As we are nearing our two year mark in Holland (Ashlyn will be two at the end of this month), I am realizing more everyday all of the very beautiful things about it. Days still come where I long for the life of Italy, but I am also seeing that life with Ashlyn has a lot more of Italy than I ever thought it would. 

Almost nine years ago on my wedding day as I carried around a bouquet of tulips, I had no idea that one day Troy and I would be given a child that would take us on a different journey than we expected.  A journey more beautiful than we could have dreamed.  And maybe the reason we are finding ourselves more and more at a home in a place we never thought we would be is because there is a part of us there that has been with us since the beginning....tulips.  I love it because it is like a little piece of Ashlyn was with us on our wedding day. Every spring when I see the tulips blooming, I will always think of my husband and our wedding day and a little girl that took us to Holland and showed us how amazing it is there.....and that they even have tulips.