All My Parents: Seeking a Sense of Self in Family

Description

In All My Parents: Seeking a Sense of Self in Family, Nancy Henderson-James contemplates the impact of her ancestors and descendants on her relationship to family. She delves into the lives of parents and grandparents and how their personality traits and passions affected her. When she married at 23, her husband’s family also influenced her and their children, who at times stepped in to teach her how to be a mother. The arrival of her grandchildren brought her life into balance, revealing that family is to nurture and love, to care for each tiny human who joins our lives, to appreciate each unique personality and the pure joy inherent in participating in family life. From her grandparents, to her parents and surrogates, to her children and grandchildren, Henderson-James follows the family arc and discovers a way back to family integration.

Among the growing number of books examining the effects of a globally mobile childhood, All My Parents takes a deeper look into issues of attachment disruptions. What happens to not only individuals, but family relationships themselves when there are frequent changes in family patterns due to mobility? For all who have lived globally mobile lives, or grown up in families whose parents are divorced, or worked with children of refugees, foster kids, or any other number of ways attachment patterns are interrupted, this is an important book. It reveals how such a story impacts the deepest places of a soul and family relationships. I highly recommend it.
—–Ruth E. Van Reken, co-author of Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds and co-founder, Families in Global Transition

All My Parents is fueled with personal observations, pithy and lyrical writing. Nancy Henderson-James journeys back to examine the meaning of family roots and broken branches. Always clear-eyed, evaluative and honest, Henderson-James’s fresh, original story of a traveling childhood from the U.S. to Angola to Southern Rhodesia, opens her to a world of new languages, cultures, friends and caregivers but also disconnection in her closest relationships. Expect deep, personal revelation and integrity, shocks of injustice set against moments of romantic uplift. Well-researched and narrated throughout, the disconnections in family relationship deliver a tragic lesson for the reader. Great personal sensitivity layered with human experience will make the reader cling to these pages.
—–Faith Eidse, editor Unrooted Childhoods: Memoirs of Growing Up Global

All My Parents: Seeking a Sense of Self in Family offers a poignant account of Nancy Henderson-James’s formative years spent as the child of American missionaries in Africa. While her childhood was enriched with travel and carefree days on the beaches of Angola, parental nurturing was often spare and eventually supplanted with boarding schools and long spans of time under the care of surrogate parents. Henderson-James draws from these often lonely experiences to describe how they impacted her life choices, family relationships and sense of self. She not only underscores the importance of parental presence and support but also how non-biological parent figures can serve as anchoring and protective factors. This insightful memoir also shines a light on the unique experience of missionary children and perhaps those who spend long periods of time separated from parents and siblings.
—–Anne Jones, PhD, LCSW, Retired Clinical Professor, School of Social Work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with work focused on adult transitions and couple and family relationships