Coming Apart Together: Fragments from an Adoption

By Emily Hipchen

This memoir tells the story of two teenagers of different classes and ethnic backgrounds who meet by chance, fall in love, find their parents will not allow them to marry, and go off to college only to discover that they are going to have a child. She is spirited away to a home for unwed mothers, gives birth, signs the relinquishment papers, goes home. In four years, when they are old enough to marry despite their parents, they do. In the next twenty-five years, they have five more children together. Their first child, adopted at three months old, grows up in the knowledge of being different because she is adopted, and as an adult begins the search when her father dies. She discontinues it out of fear, then begins it again in 1998. In the same month, July of 1998, they all find the New York State adoption registry and are reunited in February of 1999. This reunion is the impetus of the story, the cataclysm that begins it and ends it both.

Coming Apart Together recounts the stories that are necessarily part of any reunion experience, and meditates on what those stories mean (or don’t mean). It is also an imaginative exploration of what it may feel like to adopt a child, to be an adopted child, to give up a child for adoption, what it might be like to be another mother, to find other relatives, to have a strange adult show up on the doorstep one day, claiming kin. Though the plot creates interest, the real beauty of the text is its language and its capacity for conveying the difficult emotional paths of the birth parents, of their parents and grandparents, of the adoptive mother and father, and the adopted daughter at parting, in living apart, and in reunion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Emily Hipchen
• Release date: Aug 30, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370692156

Emily Hipchen

Once, I was nearly eaten by alligators. It was my second anniversary. Once, I was nearly killed by bulls. I was trying to get to the botanical gardens. My husband invented Wafflewulf, who, with his waffle hordes, vanquished the pancakers. He also invented Angry Kleppert High School and, when he died, he was writing a novel about it. I have five brothers and sisters I didn't know existed until ten years ago. My hens are named Jadzia, Xena Princess Warrior, and Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Ruth lays pink eggs; neither of the other two lays at all.

Book preview

COMING APART TOGETHER:

FRAGMENTS FROM AN ADOPTION

A Memoir

by

Emily Hipchen

Praise for Coming Apart Together

"Emily Hipchen’s Coming Apart Together gives us vital and poignant perspectives on both adoption and autobiography….What emerges from her book is a personal voice of extraordinary honesty and persevering love."

William Andrews

E. Maynard Adams Professor of English

UNC-Chapel Hill

Out of the pain and confusion that have always accompanied the author’s quest for identity and self-worth has come this striking and beautifully written book, a landmark in adoption autobiography in particular and in the wider range of memoir as a whole.

Rebecca Hogan

Editor of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies

In this vivid, beautifully written memoir, Hipchen looks back with rediscovered anger and bountiful compassion….She gives an unforgettable picture of experiencing physical resemblance and accepting her body for the first time, and, even more importantly, of longing for unconditional love and finding it.

Marianne Novy

Author of Imagining Adoption: Essays on Literature and Culture and Reading Adoption

For my parents

Though this story is real, I have changed the names

of people, places, and institutions to protect their privacy.

Acknowledgements

Thank you, first and foremost, to those of you who encouraged the project: Bill Andrews, reader of one of the first drafts, whose three-page letter of comments I treasure; Emma McKay, whose professional encouragement helped me believe that I had written something that would compel people who did not know me to keep reading; Becky and Joe Hogan, and Barbara Sanchez, who nearly snatched the long-hand version from my hands and who have been unflagging champions throughout; my colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, in particular Andrea Musher, Susan Huss-Lederman, Ed and AJ Erdmann, De Clinton and Jerre Collins, who read or listened to early drafts; and Mary Pinkerton, whose email response made an enormous difference to me. I would also like to thank certain of my students whose own contact with abortion and adoption showed me how deep and how wide is my family’s experience. Thank you to Kelly O’Brien and Ann Malcolm who discussed the text with me and proofread it for me.

I owe a great deal to my adoptive family’s forbearance. Unlike my biological family, they have never felt particularly threatened by this project, thank heaven. I owe much to members of my biological family who through words and gestures made it clear they trusted me to do this right, in particular to my sister who read the manuscript in an early draft, and to my aunt and uncle and their family, who believed enough to listen. I’ve changed names and locations throughout this work to maintain the privacy of those in my biological family who can’t help but feel afraid, sad, guilty, bereft, and otherwise lost. Such is one of the possible legacies of adoption, at least as it happened when I was born.

This book could not have been written without the stories, and these too come from my family. I have none of them exactly right, I know, but I hope the spirit is preserved well enough that they sound familiar. Thank you, thank you so much, for telling them to me.

Thank you, too, to Alan Shockley, my dearest friend and companion for many years; Suchitra Mathur, my adopted sister, soul-friend and mind-compatriot; Elizabeth Boleman-Herring, whose editorial / publishing / guru / friendship skills I can never hope to match; Devoney Looser and George Justice, treasured friends who encouraged this project, and my career, throughout; Becky and Joe (again), my friends, collaborators and mentors, who taught me everything that was important about autobiography and much that was important about relationships; my mother, who tried to instill in me humanity and love and good manners, and my father who showed me, without trying, how to love without reason—something which made possible my loving Chuck as I do, without bounds though with much reason, now that I know him. His support and protection of me, and of this project, were and are invaluable.

Characters

Hipchens (my adoptive family)

Martha Hipchen, mother

Donald Hipchen, father

Seth, older brother

Donna, sister-in-law

Kevin, their son

Courtney, their daughter

Dean, younger brother

Baris (my biological family)

Joe Bari, father

Anna Delany Bari, mother

Tony, brother

Julie, sister

Debi, sister

Bob and Jim, twin brothers

Brianna, Bob’s wife

Baris/DeMarias (family of Joe Bari)

Nana, Joe’s mother

Uncle George, Joe’s brother

Aunt Ellen, Joe’s sister

Delanys (family of Anna Delany Bari)

Varina Delany, Anna’s mother

Michael Delany, Anna’s father

Aunt Elizabeth (Beth), Anna’s sister

Others

Louise, administrator at The Immaculate Conception Infant Home

Marilyn Butler, Anna Delany Bari’s alias while at The Immaculate Conception

Jeff, my ex-husband

Patrick, my boyfriend

Billy, another boyfriend, from high school

Here It Starts

I am reading memoirs these days, swallowing them up, in the spaces between teaching and grading and being human, as if they are the only sustenance I have. I want to know other people’s lives. Why they write them. What they write about. How they write about them.

I find they are not so different from mine, really, only the details vary. One woman describes how she found out that her family is Jewish, another discovers her real face, another writes about her mother’s death from cancer, another, about her escape from her abusive husband. I devour them all indiscriminately like éclairs, the guilty cream still at the corners of my mouth, gulped down in some reverse belch of rumination. Why do I want to know? What can they tell me?

Perhaps that I am not alone, that old cliché. The one that needs constant reaffirmation. My colleague’s twin sister tells me that reading this book I have written was not an act of extending her personality; she didn’t need to imagine what it must be like. Everyone is searching for his lost parents, she writes on the yellow legal paper she leaves under my office door, the script black and definite. Every parent is lost, even the ones who are less than a phone call, maybe even only touching distance away. The problem is universal, its politics never very far from the nerve ends of everyone who by virtue of being born, being severed, is looking to reunite. My family is Jewish, my face unknowable, my mother dead of cancer, my escape necessary. My kitchen, your kitchen. My story, your story.

***

Every day like a criminal whose weapon is scissors I secret from the newspaper stories of my life. I have taped up one of these stories on the window next to me. Behind it my neighborhood, becoming green again, is dark with impending rain, but the headline on the article is coal-black and clear: ‘Father’ of 4 got genetic test and then a series of shocks. Father is in quotation marks.

I thought, first reading that, that the genetic tests somehow predicated electro-shock treatments. In a way, they did. This aptly, ironically named Mr. Wise had been blithely raising his boys, thinking all the time that they had risen right from his loins. His children, carriers of his DNA. A geneticist, searching for the gene that transmits cystic fibrosis, discovered that this father doesn’t have it. His son does. Ergo, the son is no son, the father a so-called one only. Father, not father.

I imagine his shock. I imagine what such shocks must do to the mind and to its web of memory. I imagine his leaving his adulterous wife, turning at the door, looking up the stairs into the faces of boys that just yesterday looked just like his. The cowlick on the one just like his (his mother always cut around it in the loving way mothers do, patted it into place with just a little hint of spit); the eyes on the youngest in his wheelchair, very much like his mother’s eyes, just yesterday. He wonders, looking, why he never noticed they were not alike. He leaves his adulterous wife and the four children he fathered as if what happened during ten years of marriage and ten years of life are erased when the door closes with that hermetic wheeze so like the wet cough of the eldest that night they sat up rocking him, just a baby, their first baby, and he trying to breathe through what seemed like yards of mucus, too much for one small son’s lungs. Through the night and the next one during which he fell miraculously to sleep the way exhausted babies do, the hectic red of their hot cheeks unquenched, bubbling like teapots through their mouths, their little fleece legs boneless as dolls’. And slept then. The father careful as if he were made of spun glass and not someone else’s semen, lay him in his crib, and went to sleep himself, watching over the sleep of his son. As fathers do.

I imagine his leaving his adulterous wife, and the four children he raised, with a single movement of the arm, fingers holding onto the doorknob or the lever, probably some compassionate friends with a rental van on the other side of the front stoop that curves down towards them, towards the driveway like the hump of his wife’s belly beneath his hand on the day she gave birth to his son, curves down like the down-curving edges of a bridge leading there, where he has no sons. To the truth. The door will shut because, for him, this Mr. Wise, fatherhood begins and ends in his scrotum, begins and ends because the boys are not his.

We are all children looking for our lost parents. Or lost parents, looking for our children.

***

The twins sit on the laps of two sets of parents. Everyone’s smiling, but the caption reads Twins in Dispute, or something like that. I don’t know what to think. They’re over a year old, they have articulated elbows and knees. The white shoe bottoms of one are cocked like semaphores. Each little baby-round face copies the other, even to the glistening drool-blobs at the corners of their mouths. Underneath me, the treadmill turns and I watch my sneakers disappear, appear under the corner of the magazine, 3.4 miles per hour. I think to myself, They’re teething already. Then I think, They’ll need teeth. Once they have an incisor they’ll be fine, though a full set of teeth is better. After all, there are those strange Greek women from myth who share an eye and a tooth and get tricked out of information when the hero snatches them. Where is Medusa? he says, dancing around with the eye in his left hand, the tooth in his right, holding them above his head, above their grasping crony hands. There, they tell him breathlessly, forced at last to comply by sheer need. How can they defend themselves without a tooth in their heads?

We’re supposed to care about Perseus, the hero in this story, admire his ingenuity, think how dim we are that we could not outwit three such old, gray women. One tooth among them. Who are we to sympathize with here, really?

The twin babies are in the news because they were bought, twice over. That’s the problem: property rights. In some ways, in some judicial ways, it’s a simple question, really, with a bulk of precedent behind it to help the hapless judge who must decide. The children were born, signed over when paid for, sold for $6,000 to one couple, $12,000 to another. If the children were, say, cars, the question would be a matter of who was first. Not who paid most but, instead, who got the jump on the deal. Having signed the title, the biological parents have no rights unless they’ve tampered with the merchandise and the buyer decides to prosecute to recoup his expenses, with punitive damages I imagine. I think of turned-back odometers, falsified maintenance records. Unless the children are defective, the biological parents’ rights end when they sign the papers that turn the twins over to the agency that finds buyers for them.

It is the way of all property transfer in a capitalist economy that it necessitates—wrong word—means profit (so intimate is the connection between the process and its outcome). Why sell if you can’t make money doing it? Keep the car if selling it yields you no gain: sell it for all or for more than it’s worth. Twin tenets of the marketplace. And so who can blame the woman who sells these infants twice over? She makes—probably, since who can really say what it cost her to acquire the property—a two or three hundred percent profit. About the standard mark-up on anything you buy retail, even when it’s on sale. The source of the goods, therefore, is the relinquishing parent of the twins; the agency owner, the retailer of the goods. Like any fine capitalist, she knows her market, knows her mark-up, transfers those goods to buyers and takes her cut.

And so the real issue is not the sale of the children—as I walk on my treadmill, it occurs to me that that’s not what the judge is doing, not the legal precedent he’s setting or following. No one’s being prosecuted for a crime, or even thinking the words slavery or kidnapping; we’re merely sorting out custody rights here. Whose property are these little girls?

***

Briefly, this spring, there is a furor over a missing boat off the coast of Africa. Loaded, we’re told, with children bound for slavery. Little black children stolen or bought from their parents. It makes us uncomfortable. It’s too close, on the one hand, to American history, to Spielbergian visions of lovely black women raped, of men crammed into the hold like so many packages, of that horrible scene, the lightening of the load. A splash, a close-up of a doomed face, a rattle of the links, the sound of an anchor and chain grating heavily across the deck, only this anchor is a charm bracelet dangling men and women who, unfortunately, eat. And have weight. You see the blue water, you relive that time in the sea when you were two or three years old, just learning to swim but not yet competent, and looking up through the green to the faraway surface that mocks you like a mirror. Knowing you must breathe soon and hoping you can wait until you spring out of the water, shake it from your eyes and gulp in all that lovely air. The panic of the second right before you splash into the air, the flailing bubbles around your arms, the frantic leg-kicking. You imagine as you watch the Africans, hopeless, the phrase beyond despair making sense now, drop, skid, splash, and you know that they will look up into that mirror under the surface, everything reflected, and you believe they will close their eyes. I wonder if they hoped, really. That it was all some unfortunate white man’s game and they would be hauled aboard just as that last breath broke from their lips like the sound of wind in the rain.

This recent discussion of the slave ship makes us seem like hypocrites. Calls for action sound slightly hysterical, out of place, given our history, maybe even given the current conditions in our own country, certainly given our taste for chocolate, the end product of the children’s labor. Calls for a measured response are worse, though; they play to the ways in which slave ships and selling children are deeply familiar. They appeal to our fundamental practicality, our abdication of what’s right when it conflicts with what’s sensible, useful or effective. In the newspaper article I cut out, an apologist for the slavers cites history: African children actually expect to be sold, it’s not the same as here—and economic good sense: at home, he says, they would starve. At least the money they bring will mean food for their families and for themselves, perhaps, if they get a good placement. After all, he reasons, it’s no worse than indentured servitude or the old system of apprenticeship we ourselves used to follow. He appeals to our sense that we can fathom the sale of thousands of indigent children, their transport by boat into work which may or may not assure their survival. That we can understand it because we can be pragmatic, we can think of the greater good, we can be culturally aware. Africans do things differently, perhaps even more primitively. It’s all right, it’s a useful system. It makes a kind of sense.

But what he really means, clothing it all in language about them, is that we can understand it because it is not so far away at all from what we know, what we do, who we are.

***

In the magazine I’m holding, someone’s shoving a gun in young Elian Gonzalez’s face. He opens his mouth, a trick of perspective makes it look as if he’s about to bite off the end. I wish he would.

It is not a good picture, though I suppose it’s good enough. I imagine what the photographer saw, how he clipped this little bit out of the whole of that evening, out of the whole of that sorry little episode so enthralling to us all because it mixed the headiness of real politic with the familiarity of domestic politics. And because it shows us so clearly how sometimes our belief systems go incoherent all at once. A child belongs with his parents. Children deserve the best. What happens when what’s really best for the child, what will probably give him freedom and comfort, separates him from his father, a father who loves him, wants him, has not and would not hurt him, is only relatively poor and lives someplace we don’t approve of?

In the picture I’m looking at, the gun is dead-center across the fold in the paper. The child, eyes big with fear, sits to the right of the gun in the arms of a man who is not his father, a man who holds him like I’ve seen animals hold their young, up on one hip, hand under the boy’s armpit, leaning a little away from his body in order to balance. The child’s legs wrap around the man’s waist. One arm hooks around his neck, the other is caught midair, gesticulating. The man looks into the face of the boy, the boy into the face of the man with the gun. Everything is lit by a single, yellowish light-bulb in the open closet behind them. It makes a yellow halo, but not around anyone’s head.

I wonder: were they hiding in the closet when the man came to take the boy to his real father, back to the plane, back over the sea that he bobbed in for I don’t know how many days, bobbed in with his dead mother somewhere underneath like the corpse of a mermaid always drowning? Why did they catch them here, in this room obviously a bedroom, with the closet doors open and the shirts, so many of them, lined up in back? I don’t know, since I only look at this picture, avoid everything else. I don’t even read the text. Enough of the story comes to me in graphic snippets in check-out lines, or passing by televisions in department stores, by cultural osmosis. Merely breathing, I can catch the narrative thread, so incredibly familiar.

I wonder: had his father been a French aristocrat, what would we have done? Or a Spanish tradesman? What if, instead of passing across the bright Caribbean, under dark stars in a warm sea, he had escaped the deep cold grasp of the gray Atlantic? Whose child would he have been, then?

APART

Chapter 1

What There Is to Know

Fifteen days ago came the call. A Tuesday. I was home to let out the dogs between class and the departmental meeting I wanted to skip but didn’t dare to. The red eye on the answering machine blinked and so I hit the button, walking past to get the mail, knowing that surely no one I wanted to talk to would be calling then. Knowing the message was irrelevant.

What I hear is a woman’s voice. I immediately think New York, I immediately think foreign, unknown, stranger, and tune out all but anything that might be important. The timbre of the voice is deep, it has a girlishness to it though, an under-giggle of helium, so I think young. Her voice wavers and stammers in fits and starts like a dog on three legs, wrinkling the words. I think: wait, slow down, careful. Just say it. I can’t understand it, I can’t hear it, and so I reverse the tape, put my ear near the speaker, set the mail down untouched.

Hello, my machine says, Ah. Hello. This is Anna Bari. I reverse. I replay. I cannot catch the name. I give up, let it play out. We live out here, it tells me, but where, I can’t catch where either. Your father my husband and I would like to talk to you. Will you call us? I think, hearing father, It must be a wrong number. My father’s been dead for ten years. I think, how many men are there? I listen for the grammar, the commas. Husband, father; husband father, one or two men? Who? Who is this?

Tape noise spinning now.