I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability. It is like this.
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you are going to have a baby, it"s like preparing a vacation trip to Italy. You
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a bunch of guidebooks and make wonderful
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. You may learn some useful phrases
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Italian. It"s all very exciting.
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several months of eager expectation, the day finally
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. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours
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, the plane lands in Holland. "Why Holland" you say. "I sign up
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Italy! All my life I"ve dreamed
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going to Italy." But you have landed in Holland and
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you must stay.
The important thing is to remember that they haven"t taken you
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a horrible, disgusting, filthy place. It"s just a
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place. So you go out and buy new guidebooks
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you must learn a whole new language. Holland may be slower-paced
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Italy. But after you have been there for a while, you
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that Holland has windmills and tulips(郁金香). Everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy, and they are all boasting about
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a wonderful time they had there. And for the
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of your life you will say, "Yes, that"s where I was
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to go". But if you spend your life
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the fact that you didn"t get to Italy, you may never be free to
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the very special, the very lovely things about Holland.