On our walks back from school, my mother and I used to hop together on the sidewalks sometimes. She didn’t care if people watched. In Tehran, we didn’t own a car so we walked everywhere, and rode buses often, cabs on occasion. Mom took me to my doctor appointments, my gymnastics class, my art lessons, and to the bazar or the small markets. I was often buried between long, dark veils inside the crowded buses. The women were separated by a metal bar so there was no chance to intermix with the men on the bus. Of course, the women’s section was much smaller and we rarely found an empty seat. I could never breathe, but somehow my mother held onto my small fingers and never let go. Sometimes she gave me treats, like the yummy hot donuts with the chocolate glaze or the plain sweet ones shaped like a telephone.
Now that I think about it, I realize that if we had a car I wouldn’t have seen as many things as I saw in my 11 years of walking in the streets of Tehran. All the different neighborhoods, the many shortcuts, the people that were just bystanders. I didn’t know then that one day those walks would become my only memories of the streets of Tehran.
My mother was always braver. She pushed me so high on the swing and with so much strength that I yelled and screamed for her to stop, almost in tears from fear. I don’t remember her ever appearing scared or fearful. She either hid it well or had no reason to let it take over. She was a housewife, an embroider, and had a natural talent for singing. She always knew where she was going, knew when to say no if I wanted something I didn’t need like an expensive toy. She signed me up for classes every summer. Her biggest mission was to make me swim. “Your older sister learned to swim at five years old,” she always said. We couldn’t afford a piano, but she put me in a music class anyway. I hated it, naturally, and quit after the teacher made fun of me in front of the whole class for holding the Orff sticks incorrectly.
When I was a bit older, I began noticing the age difference. When talking to classmates, I was always the one who had the oldest parents. Once, when Mom was peeling a pomegranate and emptying the seeds into a bowl, I asked her what would happen if she died, what would I do without her. I calculated how old she would be when I reached high school, and the number frightened me. “I am not dead yet, am I?” she asked, a clever smile forming on her face. I was embarrassed by my question, but I needed reassurance.
When my father left us for the States, I was eight. My mother says that after he left, I began picking at my fingernails, tearing them with my fingers. The crying also began, the sudden sobs, the ones that were loud enough for everyone to hear. It seemed like I missed him the most. No one else cried in my family, not my older siblings, not my mother. And if they did, I never saw. Mom got angry at me for missing him, not because I did, but because she didn’t know what to do about it.
It was then that my relationship with my mother became different. I got angry at her probably because I imagined she didn’t care as much that he was gone. If she ever missed him, I never knew, for she never expressed it. She was just so perfect all the time, I never saw a moment of weakness in her. But I was the one who was weak. I was the one who cried and had terrible moods, who didn’t want to go to school, and cried every morning, who had nightmares. And I’ve grown up still trying to prove my mother wrong. I still haven’t managed to be strong, though she would beg to differ.
I used to think that I loved my father more. I think I thought that it was the least I could do to make up for him being gone, by telling myself I loved him more. I wanted to fill the gap. We made phone calls for four years to my father, always counting the time difference, always planning ahead, always hoping we would join him soon. If there ever was a god in my life, it was during that time, for I needed to believe in something. When you are a child and your family is broken up, you can only rely on a great being, especially if that’s what the school system teaches you too.