The Sitting Swing
Irene Watson
(Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
2005 Plain View Press
ISBN: 1891386492

Until she faces her past a therapist can go no further in her work to help others.

The Sitting Swing is a memoir which begins at the end, in a recovery center, where Irene Watson has gone to “understand”. What, she's not quite sure. After all, she's a highly successful dynamo, with all the accoutrements of the child of immigrants dreams: career, home, family, friends.

She's also decided she knows it all, & no one could tell her anything new. & yet... now she's arrived, everso reluctantly & defensively at this month-long, sequestered seminar, in a “utopian little institute” which all her friends “swore [had] changed their lives.” She'd become tired of them all yakking on in “Avalon talk”, had plunked-down good money & here she was kicking & screaming on the inside, hunting for every flaw in everyone she meets, & taking great delight in outwitting “them”, first by covering up the surveillance camera in her room.

Born into a tight-knit, Ukrainian-speaking community & a family beaten down by guilt, shame & grief over the death of their first born son, Irene's world was smothered by old world immigrant culture & blame, & of her mother who kept Irene close to home, segregated from the new culture, & the target of aggression by male cousins, & scornful townspeople.

The Sitting Swing was a rope, hung from a tree next to the tiny cottage her Russian immigrant father built from hand-milled logs & mud in Northern Canada. Any motion at all would smash you into a thorny rose bush. It was a place of play in a family which didn't know how to play. & Irene Watson's childhood swung back & forth between the old & the new.

The Sitting Swing is a lively & frank record of one person's adventure into the realm of self-discovery, memories, responsibility for one's own life & the art of taking it back. Taking it back from forgotten childhood events & lessons that unconsciously drive us into deadends, into rages, into obsessions with control, into immoderate use of drugs & drink -- anything to soothe those dreadful pangs of helplessness, insatiability & the fear of a boring & empty future.

As Dr. Jan Ford Mustin says in the Forward (sic): “Through telling our story each of us learns to sort out appearances from reality, our persona or false self from our true identity. It is in storytelling that we uncover the true meanings of the metaphors that our lives have pieced together in a sort of hieroglyphic code of human events, joys and sorrows, laughter and pain, beauty and despair... Irene Watson generously and artfully invites the reader to experience the stories of her life in order to decode their own.” (p.3)

A simply told passionate telling of one person's wrestle with reality, & the consequences of her behavior patterns. & while it's in dire need of a copy editor, it rang all my bells. As an est graduate myself, as well as a sometime user of more usual psychotherapy methods, I love a good internal adventure, complete with a life-changing “Ahha!” &, by the way, The Sitting Swing would never have been written had the author not had that “Ahha!”
(11/20/05)

Rebecca