Elizabeth Westmark

It's never too late to have a happy childhood.

Biography
Mother did me a big favor when she suggested that perhaps I had been switched at birth. "There were alot of Cuban babies in that hospital. Maybe you were one of them!"

I was about 8 when this quaint seed got planted. Born in Miami Springs, many babies of Cuban heritage were entering life in these United States at the same time I was. Perhaps, she opined, I might be one of them and her real baby was living in disguise with another family.

Quite a concept for an 8 year old to digest. Let's see: wiry, black-haired little girl, big white teeth, olive skin gleaming in a white Easter dress. Then there were my older sisters: one a blue-eyed blonde, the other a green-eyed redhead. Hmmn.

Despite the fact that Mother was teasing, and my roots bind me no further south than Mississippi and Alabama, that seed germinated. And the girl began to think of herself as a free agent, unbound by the presumptions of heredity. What a favor she unwittingly did me. From an early age, this notion of "otherness" set me apart and I created my own path more independently than I might have otherwise. It may have even inoculated me to some degree from being critically wounded by the family tragedies that came later.

She inadvertently gave me the gift of reinvention, and the ability to write my own story. These pages tell it as it continues to unfold.

Don't worry. It's a happy one.