When you are going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip to Italy. You get a bunch of guidebooks and make your wonderful plans - the Coliseum, Michelangelo's David, the gondolas in Venice. 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. All my life I dreamed of going to Italy."

"But there's been a change of flight plan. We'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 and trash. 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 slower paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you have been there a while you catch your breath, you look around and you notice that Holland has windmills, Holland has tulips, Holland even has Rembrandts.

But everyone you know is busy coming from and going to Italy, and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say, "That's where I was supposed to go. That's what I had planned."

The pain of that will never ever go away, because the loss of that dream is a very significant loss. But if you spend the rest of 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.