by Diane Burke
Danny and I still weren’t madly in love with one another. But it didn’t matter. We liked one another. We liked one another enough to provide the home we wanted for our family. We loved our children with a passion. The only thing important to either one of us was our family. So we made it work.
Yes, life was good.
Unbeknownst to me, there was another cul-de-sac eight miles away across the bridge in New Jersey. That cul-de-sac was in a quiet neighborhood composed mainly of working and older adults. Two families on this cul-de-sac each had a son close in age. The boys played together almost every day—until the one boy moved away.
Because there weren’t any other children on this street, the boy left behind spent the next eight years of his life alone. As a little boy, he played with his Legos and Matchbox cars. When he got a bit older, he set up a wooden board to throw balls against. He’d practice his pitch in an attempt to excel in the game of baseball which he loved.
He became used to being alone. He became used to making his own decisions, thinking his own thoughts, entertaining himself. He wasn’t unhappy. He came to like his own company. It built self-confidence and a self-trust that maybe he wouldn’t have formed any other way.
He was an adopted boy, living eight miles away from the door of his birth mother, and neither one of them ever knew it.
Chapter
5
Steve
I found out I was adopted when I was young, six or seven, maybe?
I don’t remember a lot about the whole thing. Who remembers that age?
I was a kid.
It was the Seventies. I lived with my parents in a middle-class neighborhood on a quiet cul-de-sac. I was the only kid on that block. When I wasn’t in school, my world consisted of playing with Matchbox® cars and building cool things with blocks.
If somebody asked you what your life was like at six or what you could remember, I’d bet you’d have a hard time thinking of anything special, too. Especially if you were a normal kid, with normal parents, living a happy life—and it was a happy life.
My parents were good parents. I had everything I needed and more. Birthdays around my house were more like Christmas. And Christmas, well I probably had the best ones any kid could have.
Yeah, I had a regular, normal, happy kid’s life.
So I don’t remember specifics.
But I do remember where and how I found out I was adopted.
My parents were away for the weekend on some kind of trip and my grandmother was looking out for me. This part I remember pretty well.
I was in the bathtub when my grandmother said, “Your mother isn’t your real mother.”
I don’t remember why she said it. Don’t remember if I said something or did something that made her say it. I just remember the words.
“Your mother isn’t your real mother.”
Sure, she was. What was with Grandmom?
I was confused. I know I didn’t comprehend the importance of the words she’d just said. But they bothered me enough to tuck them away in my head. They bothered me enough to be able to look back on that time in my life and remember that day and what I was doing and who I was with.
Those words changed my life. I just didn’t know how much at the time.
I remember my mother’s reaction when I told her.
It was a couple days later and my mother was standing at the kitchen sink when I asked, “Mom, what did Grandmom mean when she said you’re not my real mother?”
She turned and looked at me. “What did she say?”
I could tell from the tone in her voice and her slow, deliberate movements that this was a pretty big deal. I just hoped I wasn’t going to get in trouble for any of it.
“Grandmom said you’re not my real mom.”
I don’t remember my mother’s answer. Whatever she said must have satisfied my curiosity.
I do remember arguing—lots and lots of arguing—between my mother and grandmother and dad. Seemed everybody was mad at each other for a very long time.
I’m fuzzy on the details. I do remember Dad wanted me to apologize to my grandmother, but I honestly can’t remember why. I guess I must have said something that triggered the conversation that caused the blow-up. Who knows?
When writing this memoir together, my biological mother asked me tons of questions. What did your adoptive parents say? How did they explain it? How did you feel?
I was a kid!
I was fine with it. I blew it off as nothing. I was a happy kid. I had a happy life.
It wasn’t until my teenage years that I started to think about it.
Yeah, it was my teenage years when I started to think about it more and more.
Diane
One of the lessons I’ve learned about life is that many things are cyclical. Bad times become good times if you wait long enough. And, unfortunately, since heaven doesn’t exist on this planet, good times can slip back into bad.
I didn’t understand that many men when they reach their forties go through a mid-life crisis. They start to think about their own mortality and don’t like the thoughts. They start to wonder what they can do to feel young again, to ward off the passage of time.
I didn’t really believe that such a thing existed. It seemed the subject made good fodder for talk shows and magazine articles but was no more real than the latest sighting of Bigfoot.
But I was wrong.
Sometimes the crisis is more a bump-in-the-road rather than a full-blown disaster. It might appear as a husband taking on a hobby he’d never shown an interest in before, like deep sea fishing or skeet shooting, when the most exciting thing he’d ever done before in his life was swig a beer by the backyard barbeque grill.
He’d do something that appeared absolutely normal and millions of other men already did—something he’d never done. Maybe a man would buy a fancy sports car and then collect tickets racing it over the speed limit on major highways. Some men bought motorcycles complete with leather jackets and hit the open roads on weekends. Some took up photography or picked up an instrument, got together with a couple male friends and started a garage band.
Normal things. Innocent things that cause nothing more than a bump or blip in the marriage.
But sometimes the crisis is actually a crisis. It creeps up slowly and hits you with one major change after another until neither one of you know exactly how you got to this place in your lives … or how to survive it.
Our crisis began when my husband, Danny, came home from work one day and announced we were going to sell our house and move to the Jersey shore.
I don’t know what came as more of a surprise—that my husband wanted to sell a house we both loved and move away from all our friends or that he wanted to move to the shore which, of course, struck me as extremely odd since he hated the salt water, the sandy beach, and anything and everything shore related.
But I loved the shore. It had been one of the good memories from my childhood.
Vacations are expensive. My parents had seven children and the only vacations they could afford would be annual trips to visit my uncle in Absecon, New Jersey, or occasionally visit my grandmother in Ocean City, Maryland. As a kid, some of the happiest memories of my life were the summers we spent in Brigantine on the beach. And despite my husband’s disdain for the shore, I made certain my children made many trips to the beach.
So when my husband came up with the brilliant idea to sell our home and move to the shore, he didn’t find opposition from me. I wondered why he wanted to make the move, of course. I raised an eyebrow or two and questioned him about the decision several times before we actually went through with it. He just kept telling me he wanted to make a change and that I was right and it would be a good thing to raise the children by the beach. Eventually, I agreed.
It was another one of my huge mistakes.
We found a home in Lanoka Harbor north of Atlantic City and just south of Toms River. It was minutes from the beach and had a large in-ground pool
in the backyard, twice the size of our little above-ground.
I got a job as a secretary for the public relations director at the Toms River hospital. I loved my job particularly for its diversity. One day I might be helping my boss plan a high-society fundraising dinner and on another day I might be escorting a Michael Jackson impersonator through the hospital to visit the children’s ward.
Danny, believe it or not, continued to commute an hour and a half from his job outside Trenton to our new home.
I thought everything was great. Everyone was happy.
I thought wrong.
Even when Danny began dieting and losing a lot of weight, when he changed his hair style … even when he traded his comfortable flannel shirts for sport shirts and nice jeans, I didn’t realize trouble was brewing.
I’d compliment him on the changes in his appearance. I can remember one instance, in particular, when I actually came up behind him while he was standing at the coffee pot getting a cup of brew. I wrapped my arms around his waist, placed my head on his back, and said, “Wow! You’re looking so good these days. I better be careful or some sweet young thing is going to come along and snatch you away.”
Both of us laughed. Little did we know.
Shortly after we moved to the Lanoka Harbor home, my sister called. She was going through a difficult divorce and, due to extenuating family circumstances, it wasn’t a good idea for her to move in with my parents. She needed a place to stay and, of course, Danny and I welcomed her with open arms to our home.
She moved in with her two children—a girl, aged four, and a little boy, aged two. We only had three bedrooms so we turned our formal dining room into a fourth bedroom. It was a small home and now it became smaller. But isn’t that what families do? They reach out and help one another when it’s needed. So our two families merged into one within the walls of my little shore home.
For months we thought we had the perfect situation. I’d work during the day. She’d work as a waitress at night. All four children were cared for and never left alone.
The trouble started when I switched from the day shift to a more lucrative position on the night shift in the nursing department and my sister switched from nights to days at the restaurant.
To this day, I will never truly understand what happened or how it happened. All I know is less than six months after my sister walked in my door, my husband stared me right in the eyes and declared his undying love—for my sister.
Before I ever knew what hit me, I had filed for divorce, had moved with my children back to Michigan to live with my parents, and was unsuccessfully trying to cope with more of life’s hurts, betrayals, and pain.
My sister was living with her children in my home with my husband who was now the new love in her life.
I’ve reconciled with my sister since those days. It wasn’t easy and took many, many years to get past the betrayal and hurt. To this day, I do not know, and probably never will know, why she did what she did. Truthfully, even now, over three decades later, I don’t believe she knows what made her make the choices she made either.
All I will say in her defense is that our childhood home held more secrets than are shared here. Secrets that hurt. Secrets that scar. Possibly those secrets could cause a person to be so afraid of going back that they kick into their own survival mode and do whatever they have to not to return.
My sister caused me and my children unbearable pain and negatively impacted our lives. That’s the truth.
But I can’t and won’t judge her. People aren’t perfect. Imperfect people can do terrible, horrible things to each other and yet still be worth loving and forgiving.
My sister is one of those people.
I love her. I forgave her.
She has to live with the consequences of what she did and, when I look back at her life since those days, she has paid and continues to pay for her choices.
Needless to say, the divorce was not amicable.
Divorces are never easy on the children, but ours was extra difficult.
My children’s aunt now took on the role of their step-mother. Their cousins, living in their old house, now called my children’s father Dad. The familial emotional support most people rely on when they divorce—support of parents, siblings, aunts, and uncles—was now torn between two sisters. No one thought what my sister did was right. But they loved her as well as me. She was our sister. The situation became a nightmare for everyone, particularly the children.
Add into the mix a father who didn’t care what he was doing to his boys, who only cared about how good it felt to be with a new, younger woman. Then add a mother who fell into a depression so deep she was barely able to crawl out of bed at the start of each day or function on any level at all, and you’ll understand why my children didn’t stand a chance.
The divorce messed them up. Danny and I messed them up. Their fun-loving childhood innocence disappeared overnight and their teenage years were filled with pain, confusion, and acting out.
In his teens, my youngest son, David Mark, turned to alcohol and drugs as a coping mechanism. He was in and out of juvenile detentions and rehab facilities for teens. He bounced back and forth between my house and my ex-husband’s house as frequently as a ping-pong ball. He wore his rage out in the open for everyone to see.
My son, Dan, didn’t cause the trouble or demand the attention that my youngest did. But he suffered deeply, turning his pain inward. In his early teens, he went through a Goth-look stage where everything revolved around The Rocky Horror Picture Show. He was depressed and emotionally lost and he didn’t have one responsible, mature adult in his life to turn to for direction or help. So he grew up fast and hard.
By the time he was seventeen, the black clothes were gone. He had found a job as a lighting technician trainee. He wore his hair cut short, his clothes clean-cut, and he built a life and a career that would provide for him and his future family up to this very day.
Deservedly, he also found the only way to cope was to cut his parents loose. He became emotionally distant from both of us and eventually moved out of my home to live on his own when he was still a teen.
How ironic that the child I fought so hard to keep, the child I loved more than he will ever know, the child who helped me survive a time in my life that otherwise may have destroyed me, would spend his teenage years without the mother he deserved—the mother I had so wanted to be.
The deep, emotional wounds I continued to harbor from the loss of my first-born son, coupled with the depression resulting from my sister’s betrayal and my divorce, on top of then having to deal with my return to my mother’s house, were just too much for me to handle and I emotionally shut down. It took me almost a year to get back on my feet. Almost a year to do more than sleepwalk through my life. Almost a year to become the mother I had used to be.
But it was too late for my children.
The youngest was living with his father and still wreaking havoc and pain on himself and everyone in his circle. My middle son …
He was brave enough to look me in the eye about a year after my divorce and say, “You can’t just wake up one day and decide you’re ready to be my mother again. Where were you when I needed you? Well, I don’t need you now.”
To this day, unfortunately, I believe he still feels that way.
He has allowed me back into his life, spends holidays and the grandchildren’s birthdays with me. He encourages my relationship with his children and I strive to be the best grandmother I can be.
I know somewhere deep inside he loves me. Of that I have no doubt. But I’m afraid the damage went too deep and lasted too long for us to ever be able to repair our relationship back to the wonderful, loving, close relationship we had when he was a child. The relationship that I remember and he has long forgotten.
My son has not learned how to forgive.
I don’t blame him for that in any way.
He has had no one to teach him compassion or forgiveness, to comfort him during l
ife’s deepest trials. That, I have learned, only God can do.
I don’t think my son understands that forgiveness does not absolve me from any of the things I did or any of the pain I caused. Forgiveness is for him. So he can find a way to release the pent up hurt and anger, to get rid of the bitterness I know continues to live within him. I pray every day of my life that he finds his path to forgiveness … not for me, I will never deserve it.
When my son, Dan, met his brother, Steve, for the first time, he gave him a light man-hug in which they tapped one another’s arms and it lasted all of three seconds. Later, though, after the two of them had had some time to talk and get to know one another a little bit, Dan said to Steve, “You’re the lucky one. You met our mother at a good time and a good place in her life. You weren’t raised by her.”
How horribly heartbreaking it is for me to acknowledge that those words were true.
Chapter
6
Steve
When I was growing up, there wasn’t a fast food building on every corner. You didn’t have the McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King, and others that you have today. Most blue-collar workers brown-bagged it for lunch.
In those days, Sam’s Club or Costco didn’t yet exist. The local grocery stores didn’t provide party trays.
My father drove a lunch truck. He’d service construction sites and businesses, filling the lunch orders of the local workers. He made a quality product, providing good home-cooked food at a good price. His business thrived and grew. Before long, he owned several lunch trucks.
His reputation for good food grew and he found himself selling his food to other lunch-truck drivers, too. Before long, he had built his business to the point where he was ready to take the next step and open his own deli/catering business.
I was proud of my father. He’d built this business with a lot of hard work. He put in long hours, often starting his day at four a.m. and not ending until well past the rest of the world’s quitting time. He devoted himself to providing a quality product at an affordable price.