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CHAPTER 1

There is no such thing as a perfect family. Mainly because families are made of people and everyone knows people aren't perfect. All families, even the best ones, have their idiosyncrasies, their varying degrees of dysfunction, and they have all mastered the ability to keep secrets.

Sometimes the secrets are innocent, can stay secrets forever and don't hurt anyone. Like the fact that their first child's birthday comes eight weeks shy of nine months into the marriage. Or that big, strong dad is afraid of spiders and bugs. Or that money is tighter than the neighbors might think and mom's parents have padded the home funds multiple times.

Sometimes the secrets are hurtful, can fester beneath the surface for decades and end up damaging lives. Like the secrets that hide emotional, physical, or sexual abuse. Or the ones that hide dishonesty, infidelity, and betrayal.

All families harbor secrets, and mine was no exception.

I grew up in a typical middle class family in the days when mothers stayed home, ran the house, and raised the children while fathers labored forty-plus hours a week earning the money to support the household.

My father's job in retail management required us to move frequently. The company didn't give raises. It gave promotions, which always meant a different store in a different location to earn that salary bump and move up the ladder. I think the longest we ever stayed in one place was two years. So I never felt I had a home or roots. When people asked me where I was from, I used to chuckle and say, "All over."

Some of my siblings had no difficulty with the moves. They made friends wherever we went and adjusted well to the many different schools. One brother excelled in it so well he spent his adult life working and traveling throughout Europe and exposed his daughters to a multitude of cultures, languages, and religions that served them well when they became adults.

I wish I could say the same for myself.

The moves were hard on me. Constantly having to leave friends and comfort zones behind and forge new ones didn't make me outgoing or leadership material. I truly wish it had. I know hundreds of thousands of military families face those challenges all the time and I respect and admire their resiliency.

For me, the frequent moves made me uncomfortable in new situations. The loss of the friends I'd made in the prior city made me less willing to try and make new friends in the new ones. As far back as I can remember, I haven't handled loss well. If I had learned how to say good-bye and move on when I was a child, I might be able to look back and say those moves helped prepare me for what was to come.

But good-byes were never easy for me under any circumstances.

I had no idea during those childhood years that the hardest good-bye I would ever have to face was still to come.

* * *

It wasn't until I had married and left home that my father switched jobs and the Bradfords were able to put down roots.

My middle and younger siblings got to attend the same school from beginning to end, graduate, and make friends who lasted from grade school through college. They actually had the opportunity to think of one location as home.

My parents lived in their Oakland, Michigan, house for more than twenty years. For all of us, even the older ones who moved out on their own years before, when we traveled home for holidays and special occasions, this particular house became our gathering place.

The big white house on the hill that called to each one of us, that housed us during Thanksgivings and Christmases, that heard the echo of grandchildren's feet racing through the halls and down the stairs, became our Bradford roots.

We used to joke that that house was Mom's Tara from Gone with the Wind. She'd been raised in a row home in Philadelphia. Her life's ambition was to do more, be more, and have more. She cared deeply about her social standing and what the neighbors thought.

This house was her pride and joy. Her stamp of success.

I'm happy that she attained it.

Everyone has dreams in life. Not everyone sees them come true.

Society was different when my parents were first married. No one asked women if they were happy staying home with the children. No one encouraged women to have careers. In poor families, like my mother's had been, the choice to go to college was offered to the first-born son and was never even a remote possibility for a daughter.

At the age of sixteen, my mother met my father and fell in love. At nineteen, they married. I was born exactly nine months later.

My mother never liked or wanted children, but she had seven of them.

She would have made a fabulous CEO of a large company if she'd been given the chance. She was an intelligent woman with business savvy who read voraciously and kept herself up-to-date on politics and current affairs. She was well-liked in social settings and I truly believe she would have blossomed and thrived if she had been afforded the opportunity to have a career when she was young.

Instead I'd often hear her say she had to watch "weak men," probably referring to her brother who was given the opportunity to go to college, make stupid business decisions while she was stuck at home with a brood of kids reminding her that this wasn't the life she'd dreamed about but one she couldn't escape.

My mother adjusted to her life at home. Of seven children, she even found two of them she liked enough to earn the title "mom's favorites" from the rest of us. Mom fed us, clothed us, raised us, and criticized us without mercy. She was the queen of taking whatever glimmer of accomplishment or pride you had in yourself and beating it into the ground so you felt inferior and worthless.

For some reason I never understood, and to this day my siblings haven't figured it out either, I was also one of Mom's favorites — her favorite one to hate.

That's probably a harsh statement. I don't like to think my mother actually hated me. I'd like to think the softer side of my mother, which I saw outside the doors of our home in social circles or with strangers on the street, would have prevented her from ever feeling hatred for anyone.

But she sure did carry a very, very heavy dislike for me.

Even though we were oil and water, we were also mother and daughter. Although I didn't always like my mother, I loved her. She wasn't perfect. Neither am I. She made some terrible mistakes in her life. So have I. I helped care for her in the final days of her life. I sat by her bedside with my father and siblings until she died. I visit her grave occasionally. And I miss her.

She was my mother.

A part of me and me a part of her.

Sometimes I catch a glimpse of her when I look at my reflection in the mirror. Or I've heard the echo of her voice when I scolded my children with idle threats like "Get in that bed or I'm coming up there."

So I am not trying to bash my mother.

She did the best she could being the person she was and dealing with the circumstances facing her.

I understand that.

But if this is to be a truthful depiction of events, a true testament of how one person's decisions can so negatively impact another person's life, then I have to discuss my mother — and myself — and the choices we made.

I was eighteen and had just finished my first year of college when I met Steve's father. I had gotten a summer job on the assembly line of a plastics plant packing trash bags. Steve's father was a year older and it was his job to keep the machines up and running. On a visa from a foreign country, I found him fascinating and, for me, it was definitely love at first sight.

I was nineteen and four months pregnant before I had the courage to tell my mother. But ... the truth is that I never had to tell her. One afternoon I was sitting on the side of my bed. She was standing in the hallway. She looked at me, really looked at me, and she knew. I will never forget the expressions racing across her face, the shock, the disbelief, the shame, and finally the rage.

"Are you pregnant?" she screamed at me from my bedroom's open doorway.

Terrified, I couldn't find my voice to answer.

"Are you?" She stared at me with such anger — and what, to this day, I truly believe was hatred. Her voice dropped to a whisper. "How could you do this to your father and me?" Without another word, she turned and walked away.

That evening, my siblings in bed for the night or otherwise scattered, my mother sat in her usual chair in the living room reading one of her many mystery books, or at least feigning to read. I don't think either of us could concentrate on anything that night. I sat at the dining room table. She hadn't spoken a word to me since the morning's accusation. Neither of us looked at each other or spoke. We just waited for Dad to come home from work.

My mother had called him earlier and prepared him for the situation he was walking into. I heard the garage door go up and my pulse began to race. We lived in a split-level house and I could hear his slow, heavy footsteps as he made his way up the two short flights of stairs. My heart beat so hard I thought it would push through my chest. Tears burned my eyes no matter how hard I tried not to cry.

The doctor I had seen when I suspected I was pregnant had referred me to one of the few New York clinics that performed abortions in those days. This was before Roe v. Wade, but there were still doctors who handled abortion quietly. The obstetrician who ended up delivering my son was also known by word-of-mouth for performing abortions in the first trimester of pregnancy. I remember wearing a poncho on my first visit to him, and when I sat in his office for the initial interview, he asked what I wanted. When he realized how far along I was in my pregnancy, he became my obstetrician, not my abortionist.

I had had an appointment with the New York doctor when I'd first learned of my pregnancy. It would have been so easy. No one would have ever known and this little "mistake" would be over.

But this wasn't a "mistake."

Not to me.

It was a tiny little baby. Even at this early stage of pregnancy, I already possessed a love and a feeling of protectiveness for this child that was stronger than anything I had ever known.

Even though my father's footsteps drew nearer, while my mother sat glaring at me and I knew my life was definitely about to change, I wasn't then, and have never been, sorry that I chose life for this child. It's probably the one, right, good decision I ever made.

The ensuing conversation with my parents was difficult and painful. They were angry, understandably so, and hurt and stressed to the hilt. I will never forget my father's final reaction. He stood with his back to me at the kitchen sink and poured himself a glass of water.

"We'll put the child up for adoption," my mother said. "I spoke to my brother today and he's willing to help us set things up."

My father threw his glass in the sink. He spun around and looked at both of us, his eyes glistening with unshed tears. "Sure!" he yelled. "Let's just give it away! It's just a puppy that nobody wants, right?"

He stormed out of the kitchen and down the hall toward his room.

I don't know what broke my heart more: seeing how much I had hurt my father or realizing for the first time what my mother intended to do with my child.

* * *

All families have secrets — and this was a big one. My siblings were told I had moved to Atlantic City to live by the beach with my uncle and his family. My grandparents were told I had found a lucrative secretarial job in Atlantic City. That was the story my mother spun to the neighbors, too.

Like all lies, there was a grain of truth in my mother's words.

I did stay in Atlantic City with my uncle for a couple of weeks while arrangements were made for me to be placed in a home for unwed mothers. It was a nice old house on a shaded, quiet street. It had a stone front, a large enclosed front porch, a flower-bordered sidewalk to a side entrance. I think what surprised me the most about it when my uncle dropped me off out front was that there wasn't a sign.

I don't know what I had been expecting. Maybe a billboard that screamed unwed mothers inside, come take a peek. There was nothing so dramatic or definitive about the house. There was simply a wooden post with a black iron house number hanging from it.

For the first time through this whole experience, I felt nervous as I stood outside and rang the bell. The reality of the situation hit me hard. I would be living in a city far away from my home, friends, and family. I would be living with strangers. I would be housed with mothers who also would be losing their babies. I would be totally alone. And I was scared.

The two women, or house mothers who ran the home, were the sweetest women God ever made. Compassionate. Non-judgmental. Kind. Both women were in their seventies, retired and supplementing their retirement income by living in the home with the girls, doing the grocery shopping, doing the cooking, and making sure all the girls got to their doctor's appointments and eventually to the hospital when the time came to deliver.

The upstairs had been turned into two huge rooms with six twin beds in each. We all shared one shower, one bath. There was another bathroom downstairs. Each of the matrons had a private bedroom and bath downstairs as well.

One of the elderly women, the one with snow white hair, metal glasses, and an ever-present smile, reminded me of pictures of Mrs. Santa Claus I'd seen as a child. She showed me to my room. Mrs. K would turn out to be the only friend I made the entire four and a half months I was a resident of the home. She took me under her wing. She'd play 500 Rummy with me in the evenings after chores. Trying not to upset any of the other girls by showing favoritism, she'd sneak me out of the house, occasionally, and take me to Bingo with her. I truly loved that woman.

You'd think that the twelve girls in the house would have become good friends. We were all in the same boat. We were all going through the hardships and discomforts of pregnancy. We were all away from family and friends. We were all still smarting from the breakups we'd had with our boyfriends. We were all facing the inevitability of having to give our children away.

You'd think with so much in common we'd develop a strong bond. We didn't.

The misery we felt inside we manifested on each other.

Newbies were cruelly initiated into the house.

I remember more than one night when I had to lay atop towels because one of the girls had soaked my mattress. Or I had my clothes and towels mysteriously disappear when I was taking a shower and would have to walk back to my room dripping and naked. Or I'd have my plate "accidentally" knocked out of my hand when someone passed me on the way to the dining room.

I came to realize these incidents weren't aimed specifically at me. They tormented me only until one of the girls delivered. Once a position was open and the next girl came into the house, then I was left alone and they moved on to the new girl.

Not all the girls participated in this type of hazing. Most of us minded our own business and kept to ourselves. I know I was just as guilty as the other girls when I didn't try to stop the tormentors or try to make friends with the girls who arrived after me.

I have no excuse other than to say I was in pain ... deep, dark emotional pain ... and the only way I could cope with feeling deserted by my boyfriend, deserted by my family, and scared to death of the future was to hide inside myself.

The only person in this world who I loved was my baby and I knew without doubt that this baby would love me back. It would be the two of us against the world and it would be all right.

Many nights, I'd lie awake staring into the darkness, afraid, confused, unsure, but never alone. I had my baby. I'd rub a comforting circle on my stomach as my baby moved and kicked within me. I'd hum a lullaby, never sure whether I was comforting the baby or myself until we'd both fall asleep.

It didn't take long for me to adjust to the schedules and routines in the house. We'd all have chores listed on a chart on the wall. Some of us helped in the kitchen to prepare meals. Others cleaned up afterward. Some ran the vacuum throughout the downstairs. Others were on bathroom clean-up detail. Once a week the chores would be rotated so no one could complain about the jobs they were assigned, although everyone complained anyway.

Every two weeks, some of us went grocery shopping with one of the house matrons. Looking back, I'm sure we were quite a sight: an elderly matron leading the way, pushing a grocery cart, with at least three pregnant girls following single file behind her. The store manager would greet us. He'd open a cash register just for us (and our four overflowing grocery carts) and then he'd have a couple of his stock clerks help us load our van.

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Excerpted from "One Perfect Day"
by .
Copyright © 2014 Diane Burke and Steve Orlandi.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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