My mother sold my childhood home. The summer I was 18 and graduated from high school, Mom flew from Virginia to Tehran for my brother’s wedding and shortly after, called me and my sister Ra to tell us they sold our apartment. My brother and Mom both decided that since he was getting married and needed more privacy from our family-owned building, it was time for him to move.
I looked at Ra in disbelief. She burst out crying on the phone and said, in between sobs, “Couldn’t you wait Mom? Couldn’t you at least have discussed it with us?”
Mom said, “We don’t live there anymore. It had to be done; your brother had made up his mind.”
We hung up the phone and I thought about our apartment in Tehran. Thirty-four years ago, Dad and his brother bought the land and watched it built from scratch. Dad took the third floor; my uncle moved in with his wife on the first, right above the basement and the garden and the little pool, their mother lived on the second and when she passed, my older brother and cousin took her place. My aunt planted the garden and by the time I was 10, a tall walnut tree grew as high as our floor. Each floor had a balcony that overlooked the garden and the pool. On the rooftop, we ate watermelon in the summer, all the first and second cousins sitting around a tablecloth with pillows against the edges, watching the city around us, the Alborz Mountains in the North and hearing the Azan at night from the mosque. My uncle would knife the melon and cut it into equal pieces and we’d eat it with our hands, washing them later with the hose.
We had lots of gatherings on the Third Floor, birthdays, funerals, and then later goodbye parties for those immigrating to the States.
In our kitchen, Mom made blackberry jam once every summer. During Ramadan (when we still believed in God), we ate Sahari (the first meal) at dawn by the round yellow table that faced the oven. When I was little, I didn’t fast, but once I tried it just so I could sit with my siblings and eat a meal with them. Mom made rice with chicken and then we had tea afterwards, all of us feeling a bit queasy and going right back to bed. The kitchen tiles were white, and Mom made sure they stayed that way. Once a month, she washed the entire kitchen with a hose, emptied every single cabinet, washed the floor, the fridge and the windows until the place sparkled.
My childhood space was the dining room—we called it the Big Room because it was bigger than the living room and fit a lot of people. Because I shared a room with Ra, I didn’t have room for my toys and dolls so Mom let me place them in the cabinets inside the Big Room. I even had a key so I could lock them up when I didn’t want other kids to touch them while I was gone. I played in the Big Room when the adults weren’t around. I prayed there too or pretended when I was six, seven and eight and still hadn’t learned to pray at school. Mom bought me a small sized veil and I assumed different titles in my made up games—my favorite role was the schoolteacher where I wore the veil extra tight to make sure not a single hair showed, just like my teachers. I brought playmates in the Big Room, mostly my second cousins. Once we had a sleepover and saw the moon, full-circle and bright shining into the Big Room from the window. It’s an image I never forget, both frightening and comforting as my eight year-old mind raced with thoughts about what it would be like to grow up and move outside the walls of the Big Room.
Mom sold our apartment on Negahban Street to strangers. After years of family occupants, after years of memories, of comings and goings, another family of six took the Third Floor. Our Third Floor. Ra and I didn’t speak much about it, other than to say, “Bavaram nemisheh, I can’t believe it” over and over again like repeating it would somehow make sense out of it.
For eleven years I had loved that house and to this day, when I close my eyes, I can see everything, every detail, every object, even the single moments that the six of us lived there as a family. In our apartment in Virginia, I had nothing to love. Everything we owned, from the sofa to the dining room table to the television looked second-hand, the bare essentials of living bought from a cheap store with discount. Even the Indian rug wore out after a few weeks and lost its color. There was nothing permanent about our one-bedroom apartment, nothing admiring, nothing that even matched.
No matter how assimilated you become, you are always an immigrant, attached to your first home. I had just learned that my only home had now been sold to strangers who would never share the same memories. There was no going back now, I thought. Where would I go if I visited Tehran? How could I walk our street and not go up the stairs to the Third Floor? I imagined myself going back, kneeling behind the white door, touching the surface, knocking until the new occupants opened. Then I would yell for them to get out of my house, and I would lie in the Big Room and remember what it was like being a child.
“We don’t live there anymore,” Mom had said.
I realized later that when she sold the house, she had already moved on and willingly accepted her home in the States. She didn’t share my impermanence, my homelessness. She had taken away my safety and security, and expected me to love the new American home.
She thought that at 11 years old, I would understand that expectation.

When I go home, Dad is busy with his new iPad. Instead of doing mindless puzzles, he reads the news on his new gadget, and learns how to use his new email. He is now even more absent than before. I look for him as I search the house, and finally find him in the kitchen behind the table, his eyes focused on the iPad. We exchange a few sentences over the weekend when I go home briefly. Just a few sentences and then I hug him and leave as he is busy helping the guy who is fixing the sink. My father holds his dirty hands away from me as he hugs me and then I leave with my sister who drops me off at the bus station.
My mother spends her Saturday at Virginia Beach for a conference. She tries crab cake and wears her new dark blue jeans. She doesn’t believe in jeans at 61, but she wears them anyway, encouraged by her children who tell her they fit her fine and make her look younger. Unlike my father who hasn’t changed a whole lot personally, my mother is an entirely different woman. She manages the finances, maintains and updates her work’s website, has started meeting new people and even trying new foods.
I see them briefly. We don’t exchange a whole lot. She is barely there and I am trying to study. She doesn’t make me carrot cake, doesn’t give me food to take back to the city, but says she will miss me and can’t wait until Thanksgiving. I miss my mother and father, the two who brought me to this country and told me it was for the best. And now I am trying to make the “best” out of it and they think I am trying to leave them, that I don’t want to be part of the family.
I miss them, and sometimes I miss myself.

Once a year, around June or July, my mother made blackberry jam in the 95-degree Fahrenheit heat of Tehran in our kitchen. She never bought store jams because she believed they were overcooked and didn’t have the proper color or taste. So in the summer when blackberries were ripest, she walked to the nearest store a few blocks down Salimi Street, bought 10-15 pounds of fresh blackberries and carried them home. We lived on the third story of a family-owned apartment building. Mom walked up three flights of stairs with her blackberries in a black plastic bag. In the kitchen, she meticulously took the seeds out, poured the berries into a big copper pot, added sugar, a little bit of vanilla extract or cardamom, then left the blackberries to soak between two to four hours. When the juice began to form, she placed the pot on the stove until it boiled, then stirred for five minutes, turned off the stove and let it cool. She poured the jam into small jars and refrigerated them. Even days later, the sweet and sour smell enveloped the kitchen. My older siblings and I, eager to have a taste, couldn’t wait until breakfast the next day.
Mom always said that breakfast was the most important meal of the day. On school days, between the ages of seven and 10, the thing I enjoyed most was the 20 minutes that I drank sweet tea with fresh bread (Sangak, Barbary, Taftoon or French Baguette), Iranian cheese (white cheese that soaked in salty water), butter or cream with blackberry jam. Every morning, Mom prepared breakfast on the table. She woke up before seven, boiled the water, placed dry tea powder in the teapot and let it sit on the stove for about five to 10 minutes.
My family loved breakfast so much that we sometimes had it again for dinner. But throughout the day, the thing that remained constant was black tea. I drank mine sweet, but the adults (my parents and siblings) drank it bitter. Sometimes Mom added cardamom in the teapot for more flavor. She poured tea into crystal glasses with handles. Morning, afternoon, late afternoon, sundown, evening, even before bed, she made tea for everyone.
Sweet tea especially tasted good on winter days. I could see the snow on the Alborz Mountains; that was before they built all the taller apartments. No breakfast was served without tea—there was no such thing as running out. If Mom overslept, then Dad made it right before I left for school. Mom wore a loose scarf around her head, out of habit, and long-sleeved cotton shirts with khakis. I used to think making breakfast and homemade jam was a motherly thing, natural and innate. Only later, years later, I learned that it wasn’t about being selfless, but about having passion and interest. Mom had a real passion for that kind of thing; she didn’t do it just to make us happy. She would send one of my older brothers to get fresh bread almost every morning—that was the only thing we often ran out of. On winter days, Mom left the stove on so we could get warm. I wanted those minutes of warmth to last longer. I wanted to sit there, eat and stir my tea over and over again so I wouldn’t have to go to school, so I could savor the taste of blackberry jam and sweet tea.
On my walk to school, the only thing I would think about and keep picturing in my head was how peaceful our kitchen was. How Mom walked from the window to the fridge and back to the table so delicately, like she was floating. How she sat with me, through every bite and asked if I wanted more tea.
When we immigrated to Falls Church, Virginia, I eventually stopped taking sugar with tea. My parents and I made tea the hurried way: teabags. Occasionally when we had guests in our small one bedroom apartment on Manchester Street, Mom took the time to boil and prepare tea the Iranian way: dark, rich with a hint of cardamom. It seemed that with each year, we lost our motive to sit together for tea. There was just less time. Mom worked at a high school cafeteria and left early morning so I prepared breakfast for myself. When I was 17, my older sister received her Green Card in Tehran and came to stay with us permanently. She made us buy a coffee maker so she could have coffee in addition to her multiple cups of tea. After a few years of adapting myself to her Mr. Coffee machine, I got over the bitterness and coffee became my drink of choice.
It’s been years now that I drink coffee in the morning. I no longer eat jam and I hardly make tea. When I do think about a cup of tea, I dump an Earl Grey or English Breakfast teabag into the water I boiled in an electrical water boiler. In the mornings, instead of sitting around a table that smells of fresh baguette or blackberry jam, I smell the intoxicating aroma of brewed coffee from the percolator I bought specifically for New York City. While my family, including my sister, continues to boil tea and prepare it fresh at least twice a day in our house in Fairfax, Virginia, I only drink it when I have a stomachache or when I just want to wind down at the end of the night. I add a teaspoon of honey, but I never get that childhood taste back, the one that was purely sweet, freshly brewed by Mom’s hands.
While immigration can break your habits, it never eradicates sweet tastes. Sometimes, when I am alone and staring at towers and mountains of apartment buildings on East 97th street and Third Avenue, I long for sweet tea in a crystal glass. In my new studio that I share with Jill, we don’t have a kitchen. From our windows, I peak into the apartments across ours and search for their kitchens. But the only view I get is of living rooms, bedrooms, offices with bookshelves and tables. I look down at the street below, at the pedestrians, the cabs and cars that drive by and listen to the incessant and alarming sirens. And sometimes, when I am really thinking back and feeling nostalgic, I think about my very first home: our apartment in Tehran. And I long for that view from the kitchen, where I could see the snow on mountaintops. I long for my mother, who had yet to break her habits, who was still making breakfast for her children because being a mother was her only job. I walk into the Trader Joes on 14th street and look at all the different kinds of jams, the organic, the preserves, and sometimes I make the mistake of buying a jar. I go home, open it and smell nothing. I place the lid back on, push the jar at the bottom of the fridge, behind the Philadelphia cream cheese and the half and half coffee cream, and call Mom.
“Next time I come home, can you make me blackberry jam?” I ask.
“It’s not summer yet,” she says.
I hold the phone away from my mouth and cry. She continues to speak and I picture her in our kitchen in Tehran, standing in front of the window, holding a jar of blackberry jam, and the sun is casting a slight shadow over her head. And then I imagine that we never left.