Daughter of Two Houses

It was a Christmas gift from my mother—a Christmas gift from a long-time lapsed Lutheran woman to her Jewish daughter.

I grew up in a house without God. In my teens, I searched for God in the charismatic Christian campus ministries. In my twenties, I sought God in the great outdoors, in the mountains of Colorado where I grew up, went to school, and married for the first time. In my thirties, I saw God in the faces of my children.

Then in my forties, I walked into a synagogue for the first time, for the bar mitzvah of the son of a friend, and came home to the faith of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah.

The day of my conversion was the first time in forty years my father had set foot in a shul. My daughters beamed from the second row and my son bounced from seat to seat in the back. My mother didn’t come.

That gift from my mother had been carefully wrapped in red paper with white snowflakes, snowmen and candy canes. No Star of Bethlehem, no wise men, no cross. No “Merry Christmas,” no Christ.  No problem.

She means well, my mother, I have come to understand that over the years. Not merely that she means me no harm, but that she actually means me well. It has always been hard for her to show that. It has also been hard for me to see.

The paper crinkled as I opened the gift. Fresh paper, without the softness of recycling, gently frayed at the creased edges. I never minded the reused paper. I used to think she did it because she was cheap. Now I like it because, whatever her reason, it seems to me that she walks gently on the earth as I begin to think gently of her.

It is a sepia portrait of Julia McKee, later Julia Wingo. She is young, eighteen perhaps, but the photo is old. In the upswept hair, tight bun, high collar and closed gaze, you see nothing of the spirited young woman who was to become my great-great-grandmother.

The photo is a reproduction, a delicately retouched copy of the fragile original my mother found among my grandmother’s things after her death ten years ago. It is framed in an oval of dark oak.

“Who does she look like?” my mother asks.

Dave, my oldest brother, gapes.

“She looks like Robyn,” I say. Robyn is my niece, Dave’s daughter, twenty-two and on her way to law school in Chicago. She looks like Rachel, I think. Rachel is my daughter, eighteen and on her way to college in California.

Dave turns to look at me. My mother looks disappointed, but it’s not the look of disapproval and disappointment I’ve seen before. Law school? How are you going to pay for that? Or: You’re pregnant … and getting married? Well, you’re too old for me to tell you what to do. Or: Religion is a crutch.

Instead it’s a look of confusion – as if maybe the portrait isn’t of who she thinks it is.

Dave shakes his head. “Janie,” he says to me. “She looks like you.”

The portrait could have been me.  Same high cheekbones, same delicate face, and same sometimes opaque eyes – the ones that say I don’t feel like sharing myself with you. Same face as Robyn, as Rachel, as me … as my mother. Genetics run deep.

I wonder how my Scots-German mother felt, giving this likeness of the women in my family, giving it to her Jewish daughter at Christmas.

How can I help her find ease in my home, where the ketubah from my second marriage hangs on the wall, where my shelves are filled with Chanukiot, Kiddush cups and Sabbath candlesticks, where a mezuzah marks every doorway?

She came to my wedding, the year after she gave me the portrait, but she did not come to my bat mitzvah last year. How can I tell her that my conversion was not an act of betrayal- that although my soul is Jewish my maternal bloodline is still hers?

How can I tell her that the faith of my father and my other great-great-grandmothers called me?

Called me home to God and my father’s people, but did not call me away from her.

I wonder how my mother feels when she looks in the mirror and instead of seeing her seventy-four year old self, sees the Jewish face of her forty-nine year old daughter. I wonder what she thinks when she looks at me.

The portrait now hangs in my upstairs hallway. She is really quite beautiful. Julia McKee. Robyn. Rachel. My mother. And me.