Not woe is me.”
I received an invitation to a “High Tea at the Beverly Hills Hotel” benefit for Victoria Rowell’s nonprofit foundation, which provides money to children in foster care for lessons of various sorts in the performing arts. It was a beautiful invitation, but I couldn’t afford to go. I’m not a television watcher, so I had not heard of Victoria. But when it was suggested that I interview her for this book, I decided to find out more about her. I read her book, The Women Who Raised Me, and was amazed by her story.
I made arrangements to attend her fundraiser the next year with my daughter-in-law, and it was great fun, as well as a delicious and elegant tea.
When Victoria modeled her cute outfit for the audience, I loved it when she made mention that she was experiencing menopause and that it was definitely changing her body. “It’s a natural thing!” she said so publicly and easily as she walked down the stage runway.
Victoria Rowell is an accomplished and successful dancer and actress. She is living proof of her advice to others, which is: “Do not let your circumstances define you, but use them as a cornerstone of your strength.”
Victoria was born as a ward of the state of Maine. Her mother had received no prenatal care and was kept in quarantine because she was mentally ill and filthy. Victoria’s first five days were spent with the nuns at Mercy Hospital before she was transferred to The Holy Innocents Home for orphans. Her Caucasian mother immediately lost custody of three other children, due to her continuing mental illness and instability. Her father was an unknown black man.
Ultimately, her mother gave birth to six children—three boys and three girls. The boys remained virtually unknown to Victoria until she searched for and found them when she was an adult. She and her sisters all had fathers from various minority groups. Her brothers all had white fathers, which made them acceptable to her mother’s white family. Victoria and her sisters were rejected and referred to as her mother’s “nigger children.”
At three weeks of age, Victoria was placed in foster care with a white family. The mother of this family, Bertha Taylor, had to argue with the social worker to take this baby home. Social Services did not believe that a minority child should reside with a white family. In fact, there were antiquated laws on the books in Maine at that time disallowing adoptions of black children by white families. However, adoption was never an option for Victoria anyway, as her birth mother refused to relinquish her children, hoping to be reunited with them at some later time—an event that never happened.
Though Victoria has no memory of her two years in the loving care of the Taylor family, she says that she knows that the time spent there, surrounded by love and kindness, gave her a foundation of resilience so essential to healthy emotional development.
Though the Taylors had every expectation of raising Victoria to adulthood, this dream ended when the Child Welfare department determined that the “racial difference” between her and the Taylors would present a problem in the future. No amount of pleading on the part of the Taylors or their close friends could persuade the social worker otherwise.
And so, Victoria was removed from the only family she had known and placed with a new foster family on a rural farm. Interestingly, this family was already providing foster care for Victoria’s two sisters. So, she was reunited with them, though she had never previously met them. The social worker had hoped to find adoptive parents for Victoria, but again, her biological mother objected.
Mrs. Armstead, Victoria’s new foster mother, moved her foster children to Dorchester, Maine where she could enroll them in a local Head Start program. She believed this city could provide the girls with a better education. But, they would return to the Maine countryside, which they loved, each spring.
Victoria says that like many children who struggle with instabilities in their home and family lives, she learned to depend on her early observational skills for stability. She says that she became a close personal friend of the ultimate mother, Mother Earth, herself. She speaks of her deep gratitude for the grounding effects of growing up off and on at “Forest Edge,” the Armstead’s farm. “When you care for a garden, reap a harvest, can identify flowers, birds, animals and trees before you can read and write; this is to understand basic survival. It is so important. Mother Earth has been my most influential mother,” she says.
Mother Earth and Mrs. Armstead taught Victoria that there are no shortcuts in life to completing a full cycle. It was not how life or nature worked. Indeed, she learned that follow-through and completion were the one and only means to a desired result.
When Victoria was six, Mrs. Armstead noticed that she wore holes in the toes of her Keds shoes faster than the other children. When asked about this, Victoria demonstrated how she emulated dancers she saw on television by standing on her toes and dancing in the barn. Thus, holes in the toes of her Keds launched Victoria’s dancing career, as her foster mother recognized a creative potential in her and arranged for her to have lessons. Victoria says, “At age eight, I began to understand that physical struggle was part of learning to dance. I also realized something else that became clearer later on – that my love affair with ballet was a double-edged sword, a dance/fight to channel pain, to stave off exhaustion, to defy gravity, and to make something extraordinarily difficult appear effortless.”
When Victoria was nine, her foster mother looked in earnest for formal ballet training for her and Victoria received a scholarship to The Cambridge School of Ballet. She had arrived for her audition in Boston on a Trailways bus with homemade sherbet-colored interfacing strips, instead of ribbons, sewn onto her black, mail-order pointe shoes. Up until then, her ballet lessons had taken place in her living room, with a doorknob substituting for a ballet bar and her foster mother coaching her from lessons read from a book on ballet. She had neither leotard, nor tights.
Victoria expresses the utmost gratitude for the tutelage of her first formal ballet teacher, Esther Brooks. She learned the simplest, most universal truth from Miss Brooks; that one person could make a world of difference in someone else’s life. Victoria attended The Cambridge School of Ballet for the next eight years, funded by a scholarship from The Ford Foundation.
During this time, Victoria developed a socially debilitating malady called hyperhidrosis. The physical symptoms of this genetic anomaly are extreme, excessive, and uncontrollable perspiration of the hands and feet. For Victoria, this meant that she was reticent to touch others, even just to shake hands, as perspiration literally dripped from the ends of her fingers and palms. At school, she kept an extra piece of paper under her writing hand so that she didn’t leave a puddle on the desk or on the paper she wrote on. She tried numerous difficult, expensive and painful procedures to little or no avail. For seventeen years she wore gloves to hide her symptoms. She was secretive and ashamed of her condition. It was not until she was thirty-one years old that this could be corrected through a dangerous, but ultimately successful surgery. She had lived her life until then, being afraid to touch or be touched by anyone.
Throughout Victoria’s junior high and high school years, ballet and her ballet teachers were the constant in her life, along with her social worker, Linda Webb, to whom she expresses deep gratitude.
She traveled among various other foster placements, formal and informal, during her years in Boston. She learned that her fate often rode on the kindness or whims, positive and negative, of others.
But, as for all foster children, at the age of eighteen, emancipation loomed for Victoria. There would be no more support checks from the Child Welfare Department of Maine. She was expected to be completely self-supporting by May 10, 1977.
Fortunately, Victoria had become a professional member of The American Ballet Theater’s second company. She was thrilled to be able to survive, but just barely. In addition, she had landed work with Seventeen magazine as a model. She kept herself on a strict diet. She had learned without quite knowing how, that she could deny herself food in order to not feel. Likewise, she could do the opposite and overeat and stuff herself in order not to feel. Eating had been problematic off and on since childhood. Victoria was well into adulthood before she could feed herself easily and adequately, and understand the connection between her eating problems and her losses in early infancy and childhood.
Victoria’s