A Story of Hope

December 4, 2005. It was an unremarkable Sunday when I received the call that would change our lives forever.

It was gray and drizzling outside. The 49ers game played in the background as I packed my bag for my work trip the next day. My phone rang. I glanced down casually and saw it was Susan Romer, our adoption attorney.

When I answered Susan asked me if I was home because she knew I was traveling that week. I said I was and she said to me, “a beautiful baby girl was born this morning up in Santa Rosa and her birth parents have chosen you”.

I’ll come back to this story but first let me tell you a little about myself.

I was born on November 23rd, my grandmother’s birthday. I was named after her and my mother. All three of us share the middle name, Hope.

Thanks to my mother, I inherited a taste for instant Lipton iced tea and for putting ice in my white wine, list making, the Philadelphia Phillies and Eagles, and walking and swimming as my preferred forms of exercise.

Like my mother, I spent my summers competing for our local swim club. Also like my mother, my first job was as a lifeguard at this club. My mother was the club’s first female lifeguard 26 years before me.

One of my earliest memories is watching Billie Jean King play Bobby Riggs in the Battle of the Sexes . It was September of 1973, the height of the women’s rights movement. From my mother I knew this was much more than a tennis match. She had drilled into me that girls could do anything boys could do and even do it better.

I knew if I had a daughter, I would instill in her this same sense of confidence, pride, and determination.

Except, as much as I wanted to raise a strong woman, I was pretty sure I would have boys. Perhaps because I grew up in a neighborhood full of rowdy boys where I learned quickly how to navigate their world. Or because in elementary school the teachers always seated me with the older boys in the hopes it would discourage me from socializing (it did not).

Plus, every birth mother we had had any contact with was pregnant with a boy. And our first child was a boy.

So, when Susan phoned that Sunday afternoon to tell me that we were going to have a girl, I was shocked and thrilled.

After hanging up with her, my husband and I jumped into high gear, racing our way to the hospital an hour‘s drive from our home. Along the way we brainstormed girl names because we didn’t have any at the ready.

We quickly agreed that our daughter would be named for the strong women in our lives. Her first name would be in honor of my husband’s grandmother who survived the Nazis. Her middle name would be Hope after my grandmother and mother. Her last name would be the same as my mother-in-law who was a renowned professional singer back in Russia.

When we held her and looked into her eyes for the first time, the name seemed a perfect match. So, that December night launched the fourth generation of Hopes.

Since that initial meeting, our young daughter with brown eyes and hair like her namesakes grew to spend her summers swimming for our local team, developed a taste for instant Lipton iced tea, and avidly cheered on the Phillies and Eagles.

Yet, while on the surface the future seemed to be unfolding as expected, underneath we sensed something was shifting.

In fourth grade she told me she didn’t fit in so had decided to stand out.

She began rejecting the pink, purple, and yellow dresses she’d begged me for just the year before in favor of jeans and hoodies from the boy’s department. She also cut her hair really short.

Strangers routinely referred to her as a boy. She didn’t seem to mind. In fact, she seemed to like it. She often told us how much she wanted to be a boy.

Being my mother’s daughter, I stressed to her that girls could do anything boys could do.

I secretly wondered if this was a phase or just a passing fantasy.

Soon I’d learn it was not.

We were back east for a family vacation. Our daughter was listless and withdrawn, opting to spend the days in her room rather than go to the beach. This was not like her.

One night I found her curled up in a ball, crying on her bed. When I asked what was wrong, she paused, exhaled, and revealed to me that she wanted to start seventh grade as the boy she knew she was and that she wanted to change her name and pronouns. She read me a poem she had written to let us know but was saving for when we got home so she wouldn’t “ruin our vacation”.

In that instant I knew with every ounce of my being that I would do everything I could to love, support, and protect her through this transition.

Still, walking back to my bedroom that night I began to cry. In part because I was scared for her and overwhelmed by the decisions we would have to quickly make, but also because I realized I would no longer be a mother to a daughter, and that the link between the four generations of Hopes would end.

That night on the Jersey shore was exactly five years ago this week.

Since then, we’ve helped my son pick his new name, Alexander Zephyr. Alexander or Alex after my husband’s uncle, and Zephyr after the Greek god Zephyrus, a gender-neutral name which means “westerly wind”.

Alex is doing well. He’s got a small, tight knit group of friends, a variety of passions and interests, and is both nervous and excited to start his senior year of high school next week.

I’m doing well too. I’ve moved from the initial shock and discomfort to acceptance to advocacy, starting to use platforms like these to tell our story in the hopes that it will educate, demystify, and personalize a topic that’s pretty divisive these days.

Together Alex and I have shared our story on a podcast, joined local marches, and written emails to the mayor of our town advocating for them to fly the Pride flag in June in honor of Pride Month (they agreed).

Because of Alex, I’ve found greater purpose in my work too.

I helped start a group for parents of transgender kids at my company. Since forming, we’ve successfully influenced them to expand the company’s healthcare benefits to include gender affirming care for minors and to consider reevaluating its event location strategy as many of our largest events are in the states introducing legislation that aims to erase my child and criminalize my support of him.

Looking back, I realize now that this transition has been about me as much as Alex. It’s stretched and grown me in ways I could never have imagined. I am a stronger and more confident woman with a greater sense of purpose and a more meaningful life, a life that my mother wanted for me when we watched Billie Jean topple Bobby Riggs all those years ago.

I also now understand that Alex is, has always been, and will always be, my Hope.