When you get initiated into the world of parenting a kid with different kinds of needs, someone will eventually recommend a particular essay to you to read. It’s called “Welcome to Holland.”
I’ll give you the skinny: the writer talks about you preparing for a special trip. You’re going to Italy and people have said all these great things about Italy. But inexplicably, the plane takes you to Holland instead. Holland isn’t awful, but it’s not what you bought tickets for and you’re disappointed. You, the parent, are the traveler.
In the beginning of my parenting journey, when I was in the full throws of not knowing what to do for my kid and felt abandoned by people whose support I most needed — I wanted to punch that essay in the face.
Why? Because the message of the essay seemed to be: “Shame on you for feeling Anger, Rage, Anxiety, Fear, and Sadness about this. You should be grateful. Your life isn’t awful, it’s just different. YOU don’t GET to feel bad — you have to suck it up and be positive for the sake of your child.”
I know the person who sent this essay to me had really good intentions…but it was the worst thing anyone could possibly have said to me at the beginning of the journey.
I will always be grateful to the coach I worked with during the initial discovery of Leo’s disabilities. I am so lucky that I had her.
She was the one who told me the words I finally needed to get to a release.
She said simply,
“It’s okay to grieve.”
“You had a dream of a certain kind of life for your child. You took for granted all the ways they’d be able to participate in that life. You took for granted all the little ways they’d be able to be supported by and fit into society. And the truth is that it’s going to be very different, and it’s going to be hard. It’s OKAY to grieve for that.”
I didn’t know at the time that this was what grief was. I thought I was raging. I thought I was belly flopping. I thought I was having a breakdown. It took someone who knew what grief looked like to tell me what was happening.
Those four words made me feel held, and seen. The tears I had been trying to suck in finally came out.
And I finally understood: Grief will be one of my houseguests from now on. It will come and it will go. Sometimes it will look like Anger or Fear. But in the end, it’s just a houseguest, not who I am.
I’ve come to appreciate Grief when it visits me in the form of Anger, because it gives me the courage to advocate for my child or myself when I need to.
I’ve come to understand that Grief in the form of Fear is something that just needs my compassion, the way you’d hold a child close after a nightmare.
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Maybe you’ll wonder why I’d bring all this up on a newsletter that’s ostensibly meant to be about leveling up your creative career.
I think it’s because all of us, we feel a certain pressure to find the beauty of any situation, the lesson, the happy ending, the balance, the cute montage, the bow that ties it together. We don't want to show anything that's messy. We instinctively avoid it.
But the best projects, the work that moves the souls of others, often takes inspiration from a struggle.
What if allowed ourselves to struggle and feel grief? And didn’t hide it, or fight it?
How much more beauty might we bloom?
-Cathy