[2] When you’re going to have a baby, it’s like planning a marvellous vacation trip-to Italy. You buy a bunch of guidebooks and make wonderful plans: the Coloseum^①, the Michelangelo^② David, the gondolas^③ in Venice, etc. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It’s all very exciting.

[3] After months of eager expectation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The airhostess comes in and says, “Welcome to the Netherlands.”

[4] “The Netherlands?!” you say. “What do you mean, the Netherlands?? I signed up for Italy! I’m supposed to be in Italy. All my life I’ve dreamed of going to Italy.”

[5] But there’s been a change in the flight plan. They’ve landed in the Netherlands and there you must stay.

[6] The important thing is that they haven’t taken you to a horrible, awful, dirty place, full of diseases. It’s just a different place.

[7] So you must go out and buy new guidebooks. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.

[8] It’s just a 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 the Netherlands^④ …and the Netherlands has tulips^⑤. The Netherlands even has Rembrandts^⑥.

[9] But everyone you coming and going from Italy and they’re all boasting 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.

[10] And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away because the loss of that dream is a very, very significant loss.

[11] But if you spend your life regretting the fact that you didn’t get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things about the Netherlands.