MEET MARJORIE

I built my career on understanding resilience in others long before I needed to find it in myself. With a PhD in clinical psychology and over a decade of research on parents with intellectual disabilities, I spent my early career studying how people navigate profound challenges — how they adapt, how they continue to show up for their children, how they hold onto their identity when everything around them says they shouldn't be able to. I was a manager in health and social services, leading teams and building programs. And I was a mother. Thomas was 16 months old — curious, luminous, entirely mine — and being his mother was everything.

Then one winter morning, my car hit black ice.

I saw the truck. In that fraction of a second, I asked to live. Not for my career. Not for anything I had built. For Thomas. I could not leave him without a mother. My love for him saved my life.

The accident left me paraplegic at 34.

And then came the cruelest irony: I had fought to survive for him — and then spent years wondering if I was still good enough to be his mother.

I went through rehabilitation. I tried to rebuild exactly what I had before, to prove that nothing had fundamentally changed, that I was still the same person doing the same things in the same ways. That effort eventually broke me. Not because I wasn't strong enough. But because I was asking the wrong question. It wasn't about rebuilding. It was about reappraising — seeing myself, my roles, and my capacities differently. Not as lesser. As transformed.

That shift changed everything. And it became the foundation of everything I now do.

I wrote Mom on Wheels: The Power of Purpose as a Parent with a Disability as part of that process — not after I had figured it all out, but as the way I figured it out. Writing my story allowed me to re-narrate it before I could truly own it. That book was my reappraisal made visible.

From there, I returned to the research — this time with a question I was living, not just studying. I chaired the IASSIDD Research Group on Parenting and Parents with Intellectual Disabilities. I became an associate professor at Brock University and the University of Alberta. My TED talk has surpassed 500,000 views. And because positive psychology — and the language of character strengths in particular — had been so central to my own reappraisal, I wanted to understand it more deeply so I could share it with others. I completed a Master of Applied Positive Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, where I trained with Martin Seligman — and as part of that program, I developed a positive psychology coaching program for people who acquire disabilities. And I kept parenting Thomas — imperfectly, creatively, with everything I had.

Today I work with rehabilitation professionals, parents with disabilities, students, and organizations — not from a distance, but from inside the experience. I know what it feels like to be on the other side of the room from the professionals I now train. I know what it means to wonder whether you are still a good enough parent. I know what reappraisal actually costs — and what it makes possible.

Own your story. Write a better world.