Laura was born prematurely and along with her other needs, she had a severe visual impairment. Rich and Karie were told to consider a life care facility but they refused. Instead they called the Foundation for Blind Children and we went to work challenging Laura to learn… and to live.
Laura’s pre-school teacher, Jeanne Neumann, told me that although she had been teaching special education for 15 years, Laura taught her that even severe children could learn and wanted to learn. Laura refused to be taught down to and only responded when Jeanne taught her something new and important. Despite all of her challenges, Laura graduated from our pre-school at grade level and inspired the Foundation for Blind Children to open our Kindergarten, first and second grade classrooms for her and her classmates.
Laura Dozer had many needs and when Karie asked me to say something today, I remembered something that was given to my wife and me when we found out our son was going blind 12 years ago.
I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability….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….
After months of anticipation, the day finally arrives…..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, filthy place. It’s just a different place.
So you must go out and buy new guidebooks. And you must learn a 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, 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 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 in Holland…
like Laura.
