Offstage lives

Another award-winning actress, Victoria Rowell (aka Drucilla Winters on The Young and the Restless ), has also written a memoir. You’ll find The Women Who Raised Me as drama-packed and moving as any soap opera. Rowell’s story begins when she is a child in the loving care of Agatha Armstead, an epitome of strength, a black Bostonian born in the Carolinas, with a mix of Kickapoo Indian in her background, and a fragile white woman, shaking with Parkinson’s tremors, arrives. Young Vicki does not know that the woman is her mother. We were black, she writes. She was not. For me at seven years old, the world broke down simply that way. Yet despite being confused by the stranger, there was a gravitational pull between us, Rowell recalls. Years later, a grown woman with two children of her own, that pull would draw Rowell into searching for answers to the mysteries surrounding her mother’s life and ultimately, her own. Her determined and unflinching search for connection lies at the crux of Rowell’s ability to appreciate the mothering she has received from other women. The Women Who Raised Me is a tribute to the many women surrogate mothers, grandmothers, aunts, fosterers, mentors, grande dames and sisters who buoyed Rowell’s chances for success with their abundant gifts of guidance and love, but it also reminds us to be thankful for the women in our own lives who mother us and the power of passing on that legacy.