The Women Who Raised Me

Before I went hiking last summer I read a few memoir books about hiking.  I thought this would help me to get ready for hiking.  I also thought that I would write reviews of them on this blog.  But I never got around to it.  Maybe someday I will.  This time I decided to buy about 12 books and sprinkle them into my food boxes so that I could read while I am out here on trail.  It was a lot of fun to go to the used bookstore in Goshen and buy a pile of books.  The only requirement was that I would actually read the book, and that is was lightweight.  When I finish a book I can either leave it in a shelter or hostel for someone else to read, or I can trade it at a "take a book, leave a book" bookshelf that are found periodically along the trail.  On my zero day yesterday I finished reading the first book on my stack.


The Women Who Raised Me
By Victoria Rowell


Published in 2007 as a memoir of a woman born in 1959 to a Caucasian schizophrenic woman and an unidentified black man who was present at her birth.  She is best known as the actress who played Drusilla Winters on The Young and The Restless.Vicki grew up a ward of the state of Maine, separated from her mother at birth.  She was never adopted.

Just as the experience of growing up in foster care is often confusing and chaotic this book is sometimes confusing and fragmented.  Vicki introduces a parade of women in quick succession and if the reader is not paying close attention it can be disorienting.  She lives for the first two years in the loving home of a white family.  But because the state of Maine has classified her as a Negro because of her father's presence at her birth, the adoption by a white family is not approved.  At the age of two she is moved to the African American foster home where her two biological half sisters live. At the age of six her foster mother notices that she has an interest in dancing.  At the age of nine she moves to Boston to start taking ballet classes.  Eventually she built a successful dancing career which she segued into acting. 

This book is a tribute to many strong women, both white and black, Catholic and Jewish, against a back drop of the tumultuous race relations of the 1960's.  This is a refershing change of pace from the memoirs all about physical, sexual or emotional abuse. Instead this author focuses on many positive attributes she admires in her mothers, mentors, and sisters.  She also gives voice to her want to feel tethered to history having arrived in the world without knowing her own history.

My professional career up to this point has been working in foster care and child protection.  I have a few close friends who are themselves adopted children, or adoptive mothers.  This book helped me think again about life experience, family, history, and children's immense capacity for resilience.