#1 Advice on the Top 10 List
The first piece of essential advice that I would like to offer is for you to know that you will be okay.
If I could have had someone that had an adult child living with ASD tell me that, I believe it would have given me peace of mind.
No matter how grim and devastating this life tsunami is, knowing you will be okay is a deep breath of hope.
I am not saying that this will be easy. This will be a journey of fear, pain, stress, and deep grief, but it will also be filled with great healing, growth, and joy.
How do I know? I have been experiencing all of it—the dark side of having a child with ASD and also the beautiful gifts of my son Joseph.
As I have continued on my ASD journey as a mother guide, I find pieces of comfort from other mothers.
Welcome To Holland by Emily Peri Kingsley is a view that you can relate to as you travel on your own personal ASD journey as a mother guide.
When another mother guide shared this with me, it gave me peace of mind and also shifted my perspective to understand that all is well and we are going to be okay.
Welcome To Holland
by Emily Perl Kingsley
Copyright©1987 by Emily Perl Kingsley.
All rights reserved.
Reprinted by permission of the author.
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 flight attendant 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.
* * *
I hope this written view shared by Emily Perl Kingsley gives you hope and a new perspective on how to move forward on your ASD journey. Waking up in a different country that does not speak the language you understand is very much what I believe it is like for both mother and child navigating their way through the autism journey.
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The days following hearing the words “Joseph is autistic,” were some of my darkest days. I was living with the deepest pain I had felt in my 32 years of life. It was my first life tsunami. I didn’t know the way out to find the light. It felt like instantly being lost and not knowing which way to go.