Our Services
The Rainbow Centre runs comprehensive services for children and adults with motor disabilities.
For full details, follow the links to the adult or children categories below.
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 who 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 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 go to Italy,
you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things …about Holland
