Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey between Genders

9. Mothering - Summer 2007

Summer 2007 If your mother has never seen your face—if you have never had a face to be seen—if, in a sense, you have never been born— do you have a mother? And if your mother has always called you “son,” can you ever really become her daughter? For most of my life, I couldn’t begin to ask such questions. My sister, three years my junior, was the only daughter in our family. To the extent that I had a place in the family—a place that became vanishingly small once my father stopped talking to me—it was as my mother’s son. And, though I hated being a boy, it came with the usual advantages. I could be messy, dirty, ruthlessly self-centered, indifferent to my appearance, careless of others to the point of rudeness—behaviors my sister could never have gotten away with. Since I had to pretend to be the boy of the family, I was glad that others were so ready to mistake the self-neglecting symptoms of transsexual despair as normal male solipsism. I hated myself for deceiving my family, and it broke my heart that they were so easy to deceive. I felt utterly alone, and, as so often when I was child, my estrangement from the world around me drove me to the Torah. There, amid the Bronze Age familial misery that makes up so much of Genesis, I found someone I recognized as the direct ancestor of my own unbearable tangle of love and 115 9 Mothering lies. In a passage I read over and over, Jacob serves his blind, aged father, Isaac, his favorite dinner as a prelude to receiving his blessing. There’s only one problem with this scene of filial devotion. Jacob is impersonating his twin brother Esau, who, older by a moment, is his father’s heir. Esau, a vigorous, hairy, hypermasculine hunter, is his father’s favorite. Jacob is smooth skinned, domestic, almost feminine. Lest his blind father become suspicious, Jacob conceals his smooth forearms under hairy swatches of fresh-killed kidskin that make his arms feel as hairy as Esau’s. If his father recognizes that the manly Esau is really the feminine Jacob, Jacob will be cursed instead of blessed. I hated the familiarity of this scene: the perversion of gestures of love into lies and betrayal, the apparent intimacy that is really utter estrangement, Jacob’s terror—shouldn’t this be his hope?— that at any moment his father might see him for who he was. Like Jacob, I wasn’t the boy my parents meant to bless with food, shelter , clothing, love. Under the skins of masculinity—the pants and shirts I hated, the roles and games I forced myself to play—was something too smooth, too soft, too feminine to be loved like the male “twin” I pretended to be. Like me, Jacob barely hesitated before committing himself to deception, and, as in my family, he found that deception heartbreakingly easy; the crudest sign of masculinity—hair that isn’t even human—made it impossible for Isaac to recognize the truth about his son. I lived that heartbreak every day: as long as I kept my hair short and wore pants and shirts, no one could see the girl cowering beneath. But Jacob had something going for him that I didn’t have: a mother, Rebekah, who knew him for who he truly was. It was Rebekah’s idea that Jacob masquerade as Esau, Rebekah who dressed him in goat skin, Rebekah who knew that Jacob was destined to transmit Abraham’s spiritual legacy to future generations. Perhaps more even than the young Jacob, Rebekah recognized Jacob’s true self: not the grasping, amoral younger sibling but the progenitor of the twelve tribes of Israel that, in a few hundred years, would receive the Torah. She saw that Jacob was a first-born trapped in a second-born’s body and that only by flouting law, convention, and family ties could he become the person he was meant to be. Part Two: Adolescence 116 Not only didn’t my mother know who I truly was—I was sure that the moment she suspected, I wouldn’t have a mother at all. My skins never slipped. Lonely as it was to feel that my mother had never seen me, when I was a teen, I started to...