The Sitting Swing: Finding the Wisdom to Know the Difference

Irene Watson
Loving Healing Press (2008)
ISBN 9781932690675
Reviewed by Tyler R. Tichelaar for Reader Views (8/08)

Read the review on ReaderViews.com

Synopsis: Irene Watson's pretentious life could go no further until she faced her own past.   Her poignant and inspiring memoir begins at the end, in a recovery center, where she has gone to understand a childhood fraught with abuse, guilt, and uncertainty. Her powerful story is a testament that it’s never too late to change your life, never too late to heal.

The Sitting Swing was a rope swing, hung from a tree next to the tiny cottage her Russian immigrant father built by hand from hand-milled logs and mud in Northern Canada in the early 20th century. Any motion at all would smash the child into a vigorous rose bush. It was a sitting swing in a family not given to play, in a childhood stretched between two very different cultures.

Irene was born into a tight Ukrainian-speaking community and a family struggling with guilt, shame, and grief over the death of a first-born child—a son. The old world immigrant culture placed much of the blame for Irene's brother’s death on her mother, causing her to hold her next child close to home, segregated from the new culture, victim to the blunt aggression of male cousins, and scornful townspeople.

The Sitting Swing shows us how guilt, fear and ignorance are borne by our children. Two distinct parts of the book look at an abusive child rearing and the process of recovery that takes place years later. On many levels this is a classic immigrant story showing us that change, growth, forgiveness, and recovery are possible. It is also a heart warming healing story and a testament to the strength and courage of the human spirit.