Dani's Story: A Journey From Neglect to Love (2 page)

Chapter 1

Planting the Seed

The first time I brought up adoption to Bernie was about three years after we got married. We were still living in Tennessee, renovating a huge old house we had felt compelled to buy, working days at our jobs and nights and weekends on our home. I didn’t have a specific child in mind or even a gender or an age. I was just testing the waters. Bernie’s response was not exactly enthusiastic, so I put it in the back of my mind.

The next time I brought it up was after we moved to Florida and were living in our first house there. Our youngest, Willie, was not in school yet, and Paul and Steven still lived with us. Yet we were down to only three kids from five, and the thought had worked its way forward in my head enough for me to bring it up to Bernie again. I think I just casually mentioned it, kind of like, “How was your day, what do you want for dinner, can you take Steven to get a new pair of board shorts later, have you thought any more about adopting a child?”

As best as I can recall, his answers were, “Good. I can grill something. Okay. No.”

So I dropped it again. Although Bernie had been an equal partner in adopting stray dogs and rundown houses, a child required quite a bit more than a pat on the head and a fresh coat of paint.

For as long as I can remember, adoption was something I felt that I was called to do. As an only child, I longed for siblings and a big boisterous family like the ones I saw on television. When I was born, my parents were quite a bit older than most parents of that day; my father was in his early fifties and my mom was forty-two. I was their fourth child, but the previous three did not survive infancy. I never knew that until later, and even then, it was not a subject either of my parents talked about. I know I asked them about having a brother or a sister and that they had looked into adopting, but in that era, they were considered too old.

I can’t fathom the pain my mother had suffered when one baby after another died. Losing one baby would be a tragedy, but three? It’s unimaginable to me. I’ve been known to cry for days over losing a baby goat. Maybe she became so worn down by her grief that she couldn’t allow herself to feel anymore or become attached to a child when three had been taken away from her. Our relationship was always distant and cold. My mother was not in the least affectionate, and I longed for her to hug me, rub my back, stroke my hair. She took care of all of my standard needs—food, shelter, clothing, medical care, education—but she could never bring herself to tell or show me that she loved me. My father was different. I was his little girl, and I spent as much time with him as I could.

Mother didn’t have any friends I knew of. She had worked for years in the accounting department at General Motors but quit when I was born. She didn’t see her own family. Although they lived nearby, the only time I saw relatives was when her parents picked me up for the weekend, and we’d go places. A relative of ours had a horse farm and going to visit him and his family there was the best thing ever. I loved the horses, the sense of family, and being away from my house, which was as quiet, still, and lifeless as a mausoleum.

My father worked for GM, too. Everybody in Michigan worked in the auto industry at that time. He started on the line, then got a dress-up-to-go-to-work job, but he didn’t like dressing up, so he asked to go back to the line. They made him the shop foreman, which he wasn’t crazy about either, but it was better than an office job.

We lived in a lake house, and almost everyone who lived near us was retired. There wasn’t anybody nearby who had kids. I kind of grew up like a mini-adult, because I was only around adults.

My father raised beagles when I was little, and they were my only and best friends. I loved playing with them, letting them jump all over me and lick my face. Right about the time I started school I developed allergies, and because my parents thought the dogs were the cause, the dogs had to go. I tried to suggest that maybe it was something to do with school, but my mother wasn’t buying it. I was heartbroken. I felt as if it was my fault, and I was very lonely without the dogs.

My parents were not role models for a happy, healthy marriage, either. They lived separate lives. My father loved hunting, fishing, yard work, and animals. My mother stayed in the house. I’m not sure what she loved or even what she did with herself all day. How dirty could a house get with only three people—and no animals—in it? How long did it take to cook dinner for three?

My parents didn’t go anywhere together socially. They both drank, but they didn’t even drink together. My father drank outside the house and with his buddies, and my mother drank secretly alone at home.

I was a good student in everything but math. I read constantly. I think lots of only children did, at least before computers came along. I loved animals so much that I wanted to be a veterinarian, but my mother discouraged it because of my allergies and my struggles with math.

When I was eighteen and close to graduating from high school, my father died in a hospital in Arizona following scheduled heart surgery with a specialist. My mother had not gone with him, which kind of tells the story of their marriage and the type of person she was. He was in a hospital room by himself miles away from us when he died. I had talked to him on the phone that evening, so it was even more of a shock to me when the call came in the middle of the night. His body was flown back home for the funeral. I was devastated and had nowhere to turn for comfort, certainly not to my mother. The funeral, my graduation—it was all a blur. I can barely remember any of it.

Then it was just my mother and me, and we were like strangers. She read magazines and watched soap operas. All I wanted was to be gone.

I had earned some scholarship money and intended to go away to a state school, but my mother told me I couldn’t leave—that I needed to stay home with her and enroll in the community college to be a dental hygienist. She said I would be finished in two years, and I suppose she assumed that because the most teeth anyone can have is thirty-two, I could manage the math.

I had never expressed any desire to be a dental hygienist, and I have no idea how she came up with that idea, but I was not a questioning child. I never challenged what my parents felt was the right thing for me to do. Instead, I took the passive-aggressive route: two weeks before graduating, I dropped out. I just could not overcome my revulsion at putting my hands in someone’s mouth, especially in the days before everyone wore gloves. I can put my hand in a dog’s mouth or a horse’s mouth—and in even worse areas of an animal’s body—but I could not put my fingers in a human mouth. My brilliant career as a dental hygienist was over before it began.

I didn’t have a plan B, other than getting away from my mother, so I made the classic leap from frying pan to fire and married my high school sweetheart. He had joined the military after graduation; after our very small wedding, I moved to Hawaii where he was stationed. Hawaii is even more beautiful than photos make it appear, only not the part of Hawaii where we lived. We rented a dingy apartment in a rundown complex that had lots of young military couples, loud parties, and cockroaches. I had no transportation, which made it difficult to even look for work.

Along with the crummy apartment, my marriage was not exactly paradise, either. My husband was secretive, he worked strange hours, and we were always broke. As naïve as I was, it took me several months before I figured out that he was doing drugs, a lot of drugs, and I confronted him. I have always been very antidrug, and I told him he had to stop. He refused, so I used some of my savings, bought a ticket, and went home to Michigan, hoping that would make him quit. When it didn’t seem to have any effect at all, I filed for divorce and was right back in the frying pan with my mother.

I got a job at the mall and another job watching kids on the playground at the elementary school I had attended. I felt like I was on a slow train to nowhere. I really didn’t know what I wanted to do, other than escape my mom’s house again. I wasn’t making enough money at even two minimum-wage jobs, so I got married again—to the best man from my first wedding.

Paul and I had known each other since elementary school, and our relationship was comfortable and familiar. We got married at the courthouse, a civil ceremony that was very quick; and then I moved into his mobile home in a trailer park. Within a month I was pregnant. I was twenty-two, and I knew that my life had already changed—no more sleeping in, no more spontaneous trips to a restaurant or a movie, no weekend trips to the lake. I had to be responsible.

Right after Paul Junior was born, I went back to work, determined that my children would not grow up in a mobile home. My mother volunteered to watch the baby while we worked. I got a sales job in a furniture store, then started to do some decorating for them and worked my way up to buyer. I got to go to New York to markets, and I loved it. It was exciting to be there in the city, doing something on my own. But then I got pregnant with Steven, and I decided to quit working full time so I could stay at home with my kids. Paul Senior had gotten his builder’s license and was making good money. We bought a house on a small farm, and we had two ponies, some chickens, and rabbits. My habit of building menageries had begun.

We didn’t intend to move specifically to Tennessee; we just knew we wanted to be somewhere warmer than Michigan. The winters were really tough there. The weather affected work for Paul, and the boys were getting older and wanted to spend more time outside. That’s not much fun when it’s below zero!

Paul was thinking about one of the Carolinas, but he had gone to a technical school in Nashville and also liked that area. So we put our house on the market and headed to Nashville first, with the idea of going on to see North and South Carolina. We had called a real estate agent in Middle Tennessee, because we wanted to see what small farms were like down there. He told us there were several properties that fit our criteria in a place called Lebanon. We thought he was kidding. Lebanon, Tennessee? He showed us a few places that didn’t work, and we were ready to head east, but he convinced us to stay and let his wife cook supper for us. While we were eating, he went out and convinced the man down the road to sell his farm. You have to admire that kind of salesmanship. We went to see the farm and ended up buying it.

Paul was almost six and Steven was two when we settled in Tennessee. I stayed home with the kids, and Paul was working construction. We had rabbits and chickens again and then bought our first goat. I wasn’t the vet I’d wanted to be when I was a young girl, but I had the animals I loved.

It was a good life, or so I thought, but Paul was working a lot, he had some issues that he didn’t want to share with me, and we began to grow in very different directions. He eventually moved out, and we divorced when Steven was four and Paul not yet eight. Paul Senior was going through a kind of second childhood at that time, so I was left to raise two boys on my own on that farm. I squeaked by on child support, selling eggs and goats and eating what we raised and grew. We had a huge apple orchard, so there was a lot of apple eating—apple muffins, applesauce, stewed apples, apple pie, baked apples. I’m surprised any of us have ever eaten an apple since.

There were so many chores to do with that many animals that the boys had to help out; there was no choice. They became little men, they were so responsible for their age. We couldn’t afford cable TV, but it didn’t matter. The animals were our entertainment—we could watch them play for hours, and laugh at their antics. They were also our jobs, our livelihood, and an education for the boys. Paul and Steven saw babies being born and how the mother animals cared for them. They saw where food came from—not from the grocery store or a fast-food restaurant but out of the earth. They understood that a hamburger came from a cow, that hot dogs came from a pig, that fried chicken came from a chicken that had started as an egg and that may have been walking around the yard two days earlier. There was no luxury in our lives. It was hard work, but I remember those days as such happy times. It made us very close.

It’s funny to Bernie and me how similar the arcs of our lives were prior to meeting each other. He was also an only child, although he had more relatives around, and I don’t think he was as lonely and isolated as I was. We were both solidly middle class; our parents were hardworking and fairly strict. Spanking was an approved form of punishment back then, and Dr. Spock was still regarded by many as a little bit out there—especially to Bernie’s parents, who had been born and raised in Germany. Bernie was born there, too, but he and his family moved to America before he turned three. They ended up in North Hollywood, California, which wasn’t anything like the Hollywood everyone knows from the movies.

His father worked as a carpenter; he had his own business. His mom was a claims adjuster for an insurance agency until his father’s business grew and she came on to run the front office. His father didn’t want German spoken in the house because he wanted to be sure that Bernie spoke English. He also made sure that Bernie learned carpentry, just by watching him and working with him. In the summers, Bernie’s dad farmed him out to subcontractors, so he learned plumbing and electrical work, too. He wanted to go to college, but his father had very bad arthritis and relied on Bernie a lot. It wasn’t in their culture to rebel against their parents, so, like me, he did what his parents wanted him to do and kind of segued from working after school and on weekends to working full time.