“My daughter”
I spend a week with my mother while my father is away travelling.
The apartment feels quite different inhabited by two women; the way we move, the activities, the way words are exchanged, gifted.
She wheels herself deliberately from kitchen to living room. There is a curious nimbleness in these slow movements. Later, in the kitchen preparing a meal, I am conscious of looking straight down at the top of her head. Though I have the genetic height that comes from being her son, for a few days I feel like a daughter.
I imagine this is entirely psychological. Were someone to perform an objective assessment - of topics of conversation, who interrupts whom, body language - would these things be unchanged? Yet my experience of daily life is different, such as my effort taken with domestic aesthetics. Thinking about the nicest bowl for salad to place on the table. I find one with a flat bottom, glazed a deep blue that carries a hint of emerald, and a patterned edge with touches of yellow and green. I choose it to complement the colours of avocado and lettuce. My mother delights that this piece has found its way to the table, after not seen being since they moved.
Was attention to these details something accentuated by transition? At first, I thought not. I have always paid attention to the look and feel of things. Living with parents one of whom was an artist, the other an architect, I did not perceive aesthetics as gendered. But even as a child, and particularly in my teens attending an all-boys school, I became aware that there weren’t many who shared this trait.
Since abandoning my male identity, though, the domestic detail, the tactile, the aesthetic, all have become more openly attended to; they occupy more space and time. It makes me think of my hungry potted mint: it has been given more soil and is suddenly profuse with fresh green, pungent growth.
Yet a man may care about the colour of porcelain, or the sinewy tightness of thickly-braided hair. How can I imagine these things are gendered, yet be a feminist who insists men and women are not only equal but, fundamentally, alike?
*
On the last morning, we have just exited the front door when my mother’s neighbour appears. Dapper, articulate and friendly, he has come out to repair his doorbell. Pleasantries are exchanged; I’m hovering, bag in hand and smiling, wondering what direction this is heading.
The gentleman has started a conversation; into a brief silence, my mother steps. “This is my daughter, Hannah.”
His face has a flicker of confusion in the smile, almost certainly because he has previously been told they just have the one son – whom he has in fact met on several occasions. Any uncertainty vanishes behind his impeccable manners, and we nod and so forth, before we say our goodbyes and take the elevator.
Once the doors have closed, I laugh and put my hand on my mother’s shoulder. “So, how was that?!”
“That felt…strange.” She ponders. “But I wouldn’t introduce you as ‘my daughter Ian’.”
“And I can’t imagine ‘my son Hannah’ would work!” I add.
I ask if perhaps she would have been more comfortable if I had introduced myself. I have the line in my head: “Hello I’m Hannah, I’m staying with my mother while my father’s away.” A sentence that avoids describing our relationship in gendered terms. Instead, mum says,
“maybe I will try calling you ‘my child’ and see how that feels.” I say that’s an interesting idea.
Inside, I’m experiencing guilt for the emotional space that my transition takes up in the lives of others. “I expect you feel a bit old for these kinds of experiments,” are the clumsy words through which my feelings come out.
Diplomatically, she doesn’t reply.
