Category: The Story of Family

I had decided to go see my son in Bloomington, Indiana just before his thirtieth birthday. There I was, waiting for two hours at the airport for the flight to Chicago. In the large airport hall in Seattle people were seated in almost every seat, waiting for flights all over the country.

As I settled in to a seat comfortably spaced between groups of travelers, I began to notice a loud, sharp barking sound from the corner of the huge space. A small dog, I thought, caged and panicked. “How could someone inflict that on a dog?” I thought, and buried, in that place where self is stored, “Why would they inflict that on a crowd of people?”

It repeated, over and over, becoming an annoying random break in consciousness.  The most remarkable thing was that no one else in the large space appeared to notice. No heads turned, no one turned towards a companion to remark. Perhaps there were one or two furtive glances in the direction of the sound that were quickly modified, as if they had really intended to look at the planes taking off or at the reservation desk.

As it continued and no one else seemed bothered, I began to question my interpretation. Under cover of walking to the restroom, I turned to look in the direction of the sound. In the corner where the sound seemed to originate I could see nothing but a woman and maybe a child or two. No sign of a cage or a dog on someone’s lap.

The barking continued intermittently when I’d returned to my seat to continue my wait. As I sat, looking out at the sky through the endless windows, it began to dawn on me that it must be a person making these sounds. As my interpretation shifted, the sounds seemed more and more like human utterances, though wildly sharp and piercing.  A child with a severe case of Tourette’s? A person with autism?  The lack of response from the waiting crowd was now a gesture of compassion, of empathy or perhaps of embarrassment mixed with a desire to avoid the shame of being the first to acknowledge. Maybe the cries are becoming fraught with the anxiety of being in this strange, stressful place. Perhaps it’s an expression of what we all feel. Perhaps as this person settles into some acceptance of the difficulty, as we all have had to do, the yelping will begin to subside.  One of the cries takes on more shape. “Aiy! Aiy! Fuck you! Fuck you!”  No one turns towards the sound.  I look at the weather in Bloomington on my Smart Phone and think “Who is this human? What is the story?” not asking, not acknowledging, experiencing the collective mind of all those gathered in this waiting space.

Later, as we fly, the clouds below are a continuous floor of cotton, like the rolls that come in a box.  An occasional rent in the fabric reveals, almost equally white, mountains and then squares of fields. These places are receiving the sun. The unseen are not.

The voice of my father. This is the voice of my father.

There is no distance in space now between us despite the weight of the receiver in my hand, the recognition of three thousand miles. His voice is sitting right inside me, the intensity wiping away everything else. There is no wall of separation. The wind of this energy is passing through us both.

“Yes, you’re my daughter!  It’s you! We’ve been waiting, hoping for this call for years. But we didn’t really dare think you would want to contact us; would find us. It was too much to ask.”

“Tell me about yourself? Where do you live?” he asks.

“I live in Vancouver, Washington…”

Before I can go on he says,

“Oh, yes! That’s marvelous. Washington State! Marvelous! Are you alright?”

“But of course you are! I can tell. Wait, let me tell you about you!”

“You’re tall. You’re blond with brown eyes. You’re beautiful and intelligent.”

Relishing this paternal embrace in a way I had never anticipated, I hear myself saying, “Yes! Yes, that’s right”, inwardly blushing at the “beautiful,” almost wanting to stop him.

“You were born at Lenox Hill Hospital. Your mother—her name is Toni—just like you — I can’t believe it — held you for three days. This didn’t usually happen if the baby was being given up, but the nursery was being painted. She was heartbroken to give you up.”

“How did your parents keep that name? How did they know? How did they have the generosity?” are his next questions.

“I don’t know. My mother said that it was just something she just knew, something she knew was essential to keep. She insisted, even though my father thought she was crazy to keep it. He bowed to her.”

“What an incredible act of intuition, of pure resonance! Your mother, Toni, gave you the name as a tiny thumbprint of her love for you.  She never expected your adoptive parents would keep it. Never. That was unthinkable.”

My God, I think, they’re married. They’re still together. These are my parents, together.

“And you have four siblings, three brothers and a sister. They all know you exist and they’ve been worried about you ever since they found out you existed. Your mother told them on your eighteenth birthday since we knew you were old enough to have access to records and could try to contact us. We talk about you. They’ve worried that you were out there and we didn’t know if you were alright.”

A molten volcano has been smoldering in my chest. Now I feel it begin to reach my throat, my eyes, the top of my head. I had never dared to imagine brothers, sisters, some kind of genetic compatriots.

“Let me tell a little more about who you are.”

He is rushing ahead, as if he, too, has thought out all he would tell me if he had the chance, as if the connection to my mother and history must be established immediately. We’re both a bit giddy with the silliness of this rampant story.

“Your mother’s family is pure WASP. She’s a Robinson. They go back to the Mayflower, for God’s sake.  Your direct ancestor was Cotton Mather, which may or may not be a good thing!”

Here began the surreal.  I already had had connection to a grandmother who was Polish, warm and fat and smelling of coal and butter from the kitchen–a peasant, whose lap I could sit on in a rocking chair. This new family seemed more foreign to my experience than if I were told they were Sami with a herd of reindeer still grazing back in the old country.

“And then there were the Knoxes of Knox Hats. You go back to Charles Knox who came over from Ireland in the early 1800s and started his own hat factory. They started with beaver hats and then came up with the stove pipe hats that became all the rage in the nineteenth century. They made a fortune. Abraham Lincoln wore Knox hats!  Their daughter married Hannibal Robinson who went off to the wilderness selling hats. And then somewhere along the way around Civil War times there was American Flag Knox.  You’re just swimming in WASP-y history. You could even become a member of the DAR! My God! I hope you don’t mind!”

Somewhere along the way I had begun to laugh. Now we both were laughing. The absurdity of it all. His voice, deep and rich with a foundation of unwavering confidence, left no room for disbelief, just overwhelming joy at having found this man of such fluent intelligence, such wit, such generosity of spirit–qualities not unlike those of the father who’d raised me. It was a moment splitting with things to come, like a ripe seed pod with seeds ready to fly. But at that moment, the laughter gave me more of a sense of freedom, the headiness of delight. My senses were alive.

“And then there was my family,” he is continuing.

“Somehow, none of the kids look anything like them, thank God! You probably don’t either. They were Eastern European Jews who immigrated to this country in the early 20^th century. They lived in New York and my father managed to buy a small grocery store he ran till his death.  My aunt (your great aunt) immigrated to Israel at the end of the war.  She ended up starting the first Kibbutz there — Kibbutz Don. She was quite a powerful character, with a face like a catcher’s mitt. The kids have all been to Israel at different times.”

Here was the upside down history. My adoptive mother’s lineage—Eastern European Jews coming to Brooklyn at the beginning of the twentieth century—setting up small businesses, getting through the Great Depression—this was also in my paternal genes, somehow hidden. What a funny man this was, de-ordering all I knew.

There was a pause just long enough for me to think of what else needed to be said. “You have two grandchildren.” I say.

“Oh, God! Really?  Tell me about them!”

“There’s a girl aged four and a boy a year old.”

“You’re kidding! We have two granddaughters about the same ages!  Your brother Evan’s girls. The youngest brother. He dotes on them. What about yours? Are they healthy? I would imagine you’re a wonderful parent.”

I told him a bit about each – my daughter’s pre-school, my son’s yellow curling hair. He asked about a marriage and I told him, yes. We talked a bit about my husband.

He proceeded to tell me a little about each of my siblings, three brothers and the youngest, a sister. Brothers. A little sister.

“They’ll all want to meet you as soon as possible. You will love them all. They are all unique, sharply smart and sensitive in their own ways. I’m sure you’ll find you have things in common. ”

It begins to dawn on me that I am actually being invited to become part of this family. Ah!

I ask, only partially in jest, “Will it bother David as the eldest that he suddenly has an older sibling?”

“God no! He’ll be so relieved to give up the position. It’s not an easy one! He can tell you.”

“It’s been a difficult stretch for your mother. This will cheer her no end. You don’t know what a wonderful thing you’ve done by calling.” Again, I blush and stammer something about how it was a force rather than a matter of choice.

He continues, more soberly. “You don’t know how long I’ve been trying to make up for your loss to your mother. All this time. So many ways.” There is a short pause on the line. A breath.

We began to discuss how we would be able to meet. He quickly insisted he would be the one to fly out to see me first, as the forerunner, as soon as he could arrange it.

“It will give your mother time to absorb things. I’ll be able to tell her what I experience and she will be able to absorb it first through me. Seeing you will have such an enormous impact for her.”

“Likewise,” I say.

This was the man I had sung to as a child, whose image I had created out of bits of story and intuition–whose love I had conjured up for myself.  It seemed in some way he was this man and not this man. There certainly was the experience of a powerful love, the importance of family.

I recognized, as my mind began traveling back from this intensity of moment to the practicalities of life, of children to be fed and retrieved, I had always shied from imagining my mother as deeply.  Now I had a mother in whom I might see something of myself. What was that?

As we gathered ourselves, made a plan for Toni to contact me later that day and, as my son began to cry in his bed where he was waking, I breathed in the impact, gathering my sense of self into my body, settling my mind, getting ready to move through the rest of the day. Something of great moment had happened. Something that was not only a shift in my own life, but a bigger shift.  We said goodbye, he adding,

“You don’t know how good it is to hear your voice. This changes everything.”

I wondered and then I thought, “It may. Yes, it may.”

I heard the voice of my biological father for the first time exactly thirty years ago. For months–years really– I had been preparing myself for the moment I would pick up the phone and call.  My mind had travelled to these moments of contact since I’d been in grade school, and after I’d turned eighteen, I began weaving plans and moral arguments pro and con.

The path was relatively easy. That wasn’t the trouble. His name had somehow mistakenly appeared on the court records my adoptive parents kept for me. Although she’d probably gotten it second or third hand, the social worker at the adoption agency in New York had told my adoptive parents the story of my biological mother and father and the reason they had given me up for adoption.  The clues were all in plain sight. It was even a good story.

As it went, my father was finishing his medical residency in New York at the time of my birth. He and my mother were not yet married. They had met the year before and fallen in love, but their romance was star-crossed since his parents were orthodox Jews, hers, goyim. Not only was she a shiksa, but an actor to boot, an abomination in their eyes. So my parents had chosen to give me up, the story continued, in hopes my grandparents would accept her as an “unencumbered” love match and my parents would be able to marry with their eventual blessing.

My adoptive parents were also a “mixed” marriage, but in the opposite pattern. My mother was the one from a Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn and my father from a Polish Catholic family in the down and dirty coal-mining region of Pennsylvania.  Both sets were well-educated, middle class, and intellectual, with ties to Eastern Europe.  Bingo! Match. The adoption agency in New York was inexplicably Methodist. Several months later, when I became “available” they returned to have a look, be interviewed some more for their qualifications to parent and eventually take me home on a Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, when nothing was open in Brooklyn.

My parents, educated middle-class people that they were, followed modern psychological advances and made my adoption part of the whole narrative of growing up. They even had a two-volume boxed set, one book for them and one for me, about coming into an adoptive family.  The children’s bedtime story book version was that I was a special child, particularly blessed since I had been specifically chosen by my parents—picked from a line-up, so to speak. I was the one with the great smile, the twinkling eyes– alert, blond, a pretty baby. I wasn’t like kids in other families who were stuck with the one that came out of the mom’s womb.  So as time progressed and I was able to grasp the concept, I knew I hadn’t come out of the mother whose hand I held, who took me to nursery school at Columbia University on the subway, who made me oatmeal every morning, sat with me in the kitchen and nagged me about hats and sweaters. These things are a delicate matter with one’s parents. It’s all an above-board secret.  As a kid, you’re aware something’s askew—unique–about your position in a family, a story you could exploit with other kids in fifth grade who were envious since they knew they couldn’t possibly be the child of the parents they got stuck with and probably had some wonderful people out there with greater understanding and wealth who would someday come to claim them. I had that story clinched. But the down side was the chemistry was just wrong.  The problem was my wiring just didn’t make sense, especially to my mother. Their love was huge and for the most part without limits, but they were bamboozled about who the heck I was. This state of affairs was probably not unlike most parents, but for me it seemed to have a twist—Alice in wonderland, perhaps, dropped down the rabbit hole into a world where the characters did things that defied logic.

For years, I had thought there was no need to make actual with the parents whose DNA I carried–too important to define myself on my own without leaning on the knowledge of my mere physical matter.  I wanted to make sure I was complete enough in myself that I needed nothing from them. I wouldn’t come as a supplicant but as someone who could give to them. I’d sung to them as a child, yearning, but now I was an adult.

I had a short conversation in my young adulthood with a man who has been one of the dearest friends of my life. He was then eighty-two. We were travelling in a van-load of people outside of Toronto and the van had broken down. Sitting and waiting on that summer day, the doors of the van open as cars went by on a quiet road, and conversation strayed to the topic of families, I asked him if he thought it was a good idea to look for my biological parents. His answer was considered.

“It’s very important to see and embrace the people who gave us birth. They’re our connection to the earth, the very matter we’re made of.  The connection can be very painful or very joyous, or both at the same time, but it’s there and has to be honored.  Find them if you can. It will ground you. That’s my advice.”

I told him I was worried that my birth might have been a secret that could hurt them and their families. He said,

“Be respectful, but they’re adults. They made choices. Let them handle that.”

Then he went back to being grumpy about his insistence that one of his choices to stay longer and thank someone at our last stop had caused us to have this breakdown.  Bad mood.

So, after I’d had thought about this conversation for another set of years and had my second child, it suddenly came to me one winter day, with my baby at home and my daughter in nursery school, that it was time to just call.  Knowing it was coming, I had even written a script like a flow chart—he says this then I’ll say that. If not that, then I’ll say this.  I’d tracked him down through the Medical Registry to a solo practice in a small town in upstate New York.  I didn’t know who he was married to, or whether he was married—just that he had a practice.

With my baby napping, I picked up the phone and called the number, like a plunge from a rock into a cold, running stream.

The one thing I hadn’t banked on was an aggressively protective nurse receptionist.  When I asked to talk to him, she said,

“Are you a patient of his?”

When I told her no, she replied sternly, backed by the growl of her Brooklyn accent.

“Well, he doesn’t talk to people who aren’t his patients. What’s the purpose of your call?”

My throat closing rapidly, I managed to say my parents were old friends of the family and I wanted to get in touch.  She said,

“Well! I’ll give him your name but I doubt he’ll have time to call today. He has a full schedule.”

I left my name and number.

I put down the receiver, tears squeezing out of my eyes. I took a deep breath, thinking,

“It’s done. It’s in his court.”

As I went to make some tea, berating myself up for not taking a more indirect route, the phone rang. It hadn’t been five minutes.

“Hello. Is this Toni?”

It was a rich, vibrant, low voice, with, to me, the music of Manhattan.  It was the voice that anyone would want to hear at their bedside, waking from a fever dream.  Able to barely get out the beginning of my prepared speech, “Yes. I was born in 195__ in New York City…”,  when he said,

“I know what this is.  We’ve been waiting so long for this call!”

Before these words had completely formed, a channel of pure energy had opened through those phone lines across the continent.  The force that surged through it nearly knocked me down.

 

 

(to be continued)