Resiliency

The new Oxford American dictionary defines resiliency as the ability to recoil or spring back into shape after bending, stretching or being compressed. Although I didn’t recognize it until years after the era I write about in Swimming Upriver, resiliency was the character component my mother and my culture were developing in me.

As a developmental psychology practitioner I used to wonder why my siblings and I didn’t become dysfunctional messes as the result of the failure of our parents’ marriage and our subsequent descent into poverty. The process of writing Swimming Upriver allowed me to show that high parental expectations, the presence of clear rules and expectations at home and school, positive role models within our extended family to counteract our father’s negative model, establishing a bond with school and the assignment and acceptance of responsibility all lead to resilient human beings.