A very Disorderly response to Emily Perl Kingsley’s Welcome to Holland
The Disorderly Blondes are 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 staycation – to Miami Beach. You stalk a bunch of IG accounts and make your fab plans. The Fontainebleau. The Boardwalk. Lincoln Road. You may learn some handy Spanglish phrases (ay que cute).
Coño, it’s all very exciting. After months of self-tanning and Keto dieting, the day finally arrives. You pack your g-strings and off you go. Less than one martini later your Uber driver announces “Welcome to Hialeah.”
“Hialeah?!?” you say. “What do you mean Hialeah?? ¿Como? I have reservations at Prime 112! I’m supposed to be in a bikini. All winter I’ve dreamed of getting back to the Winter Music Conference.”
But there’s been a change in the zip code. You’re dropped at Ño Que Barato and Hialeah is where you must stay.
The important thing is that he hasn’t taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease (allegedly).
It’s just a louder place.
So you must switch out your heels for chancletas. Irregardless* you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of chongas you would never have met.
It’s just a more caffeinated place. Con muchos abuelos.
But after you’ve been there for a while and you are run off the road by a Leon Medical Center van, you look around…. and you begin to notice that Hialeah has croquetas….and Hialeah has La Fresa Francesa. Hialeah even has Westland Mall.
But everyone you know is busy eating shit in Miami… and they’re all bragging about what a wonderful Trina Turk tunic they purchased there (de madre). 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. Not this mission to casa de yuca.”
And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away… because the loss of the dream of seeing J-Rod at Liv is a very, very significant loss.
But… if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn’t get to Miami Beach, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very Cuban things … about Hialeah. Supposibly.*
*because MIAMISMS
Liiiiiiike, this is so funny it makes me wanna go to FIU. What a funny and witty revision of Welcome to Holland. I’m proud be to one of the louder and less famous people you’ve met on the journey. I loooooo’ you, Rubias Locas!
We loooooooo iu, Amy!
Dear Rubias, I am lucky enough to get to live in “Miami Beach” but since I work in “Hialeah” I get to experience some of those things you guys live through. I have learned to really appreciate the “croqueticas and cafecito” although sometimes amargo, it makes me feel better. What you guys are doing with this blog is amazing and this post was fantastic.
Congratulations!
Aaaaawwww love this reply!
Nailed it with ”amargo.”
THANK YOU so much for reading and your kind words!