Notes

I love Shabbat. Love the challah, the blessings, the wine, slowing down with family and friends as time stretches. Love the whole experience. I love it unironically and there’s something wonderfully transgressive about celebrating Shabbat at Reed College–a small, selective, liberal arts college in Portland, Oregon known for communism, atheism and free love. My radical synagogue, Shalom Cascadia Jewish Minyan, hosts Shabbat at Reed every year during Reunions. I didn’t go to Reed. My daughter does. My boyfriend is an alum. Boyfriend’s mom, dad and husband all graduated. So, too, did the other mother of my four children and the baby daddy of the older two. Like Groucho Marx, there aren’t many clubs that I want to belong to and will have me–Reed is one of them. Somehow I got adopted.

As a professional Jew, I’m happy to chat people up at services. That’s what I was doing on Friday night–mingling with the crowd of mostly baby boomers while we waited for candle lighting. Some fellow was explaining the details of living aboard a boat when I felt her eyes on me. I have a well-developed sense of when people are looking since they so often are.

I caught her eyes with my eyes. Noticed her, noticing me. She read queer, looked 70 or so and had a long list of affinity groups, each one with a different colored ribbon, attached to her name tag. “I’m not staring at you,” she explained. “Someone is supposed to join me and I‘m watching out for them.”

In response, I summoned my inner drag queen, stretched my arms wide apart and proclaimed “It’s okay. Everybody stares at me.” People do. Stare. I’m a 6-foot 5-inch woman with a loud voice and a flair for the dramatic. I used to be a man. I may have pornographically perfect breasts and a beautiful lipstick smile but I do not pass. I don’t try.

“Oh, sweetie, not like that. My daughter is trans.”

“My daughter is trans.” A mother’s love inflected in every syllable. The words my own mother, who died six weeks ago, would never speak. My. Trans. Daughter. My mother, manipulated by a twisted orthodoxy, swayed by politicians and the beneficiaries of my disinheritance, denied us both those words of affirmation.

I sat down. Introduced myself and confessed how desperately beautiful it was to hear someone who could be my mother speak the sentence I so wanted to hear. Her name was Deborah Ross. We talked of mothers and daughters, love and death. Big things.

The whole world became just the two of us.

And for a moment, I was loved, accepted, seen, acknowledged. Someone’s daughter.