As a toddler I can almost feel how much control I had over my parents, especially my father. My mother told me he was finally ready to be a father. They had a teenage boy, who probably didn’t want much to do with them, and there I was; dethroning (my mother’s words) my brother and capturing them and their friends with my cuteness. My mom, Opal Jeanne Orem, the proper Southern Belle and her daughter, was going to be a part of a very fine confederate tradition. Patent leather shoes, little anklets, a smocked dress with lots of crinolines, and white gloves with a little patent leather purse to match my shoes.
My father, an orphan was raised by a Bostonian family giving him culture my mother didn’t know, but the sensitivity from being given up for adoption, probably never left him. Victor Dayton Westcott, my father’s name, was ever proving himself as an entrepreneur after leaving his adoptive family. I only know hints about this from my mother and given that my mother was prone to embellishments; I’m not sure what is true and what is not. Adoption was what most men did when their wife died in childbirth. Back then in the early part of the 20th century.
Mother told me that my dad never forgave his father and our visits were limited to his favorite Aunt and Uncle. The story that seemed to be repeated by my mother’s secretive nature was my beginning relationship with my father and clues to who I am now. Ever present is my tale of the little girl with my little purse and my father taking me to work with him at the range. I was loved by this man, I often said he gave me enough love to last into my adult life. My little purse became the essence of what connected me with men and sense of loss.At least I have discovered that in my years of searching for my truth, my memories and perceptions.
I became a compulsive truth teller in reaction to the power of my mother’s expressive confusion and lack of being able to tell her truth because of fear. I must have observed it, she also held over my brother and me the fear of loss that she carried; only to be understood later. My brother was 17 and became the new man in my mother’s life, when I would think he only wanted just to be a teenager. My sense of craving attention among the men at the rifle range was gone. As I see it now, Daddy as I called him and the attention and the other men gave me a sense of entitlement that has carried me through my life, within this base of how I developed a relationship with men and a doting father I lost. My teenage brother who was now taking both my mother and me as a father image. Within a left he barely got out of high school, wanting college and receiving a college scholarship for Basketball; it was out of the question. He started working to help my mother and me. She took in foster babies to add to the loss of my father’s income. He was only 45 years old and his career and sense of party spirit left a home to be paid for by only Social Security. In today’s world he would still be alive because of the advancements of medicine
