Motherhood without a Motherland
How leaving Iran in the midst of war changed my mother
M y mother has told me that her memories of Iran are split in two.
The first half are from before 1979. She was born Shakiba Hamzehpour in Tehran in 1973. Her mother is Mansoureh Taherian, commonly known in our family as Modarjoon. Modar means “mother” and joon means “soul” or “life,” but a more boring translation would just be “grandma.” My mom was Modarjoon’s first girl. Although she already had four boys — Scharam, Scharoch, Schapour, and Shahab — she had always hoped for a daughter.
One time, my mother’s family rented a van and drove up north to East Azerbaijan for a road trip. Her oldest brother, Scharam, was completing his military services in the region. Shakiba remembers exactly what she was wearing — a navy shirt Modarjoon bought her. It had flute shaped sleeves, a white collar, a button at the top, and was paired with white pants. She loved that outfit.
For her fifth or sixth birthday, she was given a miniature tea set. It was white with little red flowers around it. It came with a samovar and sugar pot too. Shakiba wasn’t allowed to play outside with the other kids, lest she get hurt. Instead, Modarjoon would invite one or two other kids to come over to their house for a tea party while her brothers played soccer on the street. She would set up a little corner of the room for Shakiba and her friends, and sometimes Modarjoon and Shakiba’s grandmother would also join.
Then there are her memories from after 1979 — after the revolution, and during the war with Iraq. She remembers when her family learned that any woman traveling abroad would have their hair with a hijab, also known as a headscarf, in order to return to Iran. It was the summer of 1980, and they were visiting Scharam, who had moved to Germany on a student visa after completing his military service. My mother remembers being at the airport for their flight back to Iran. While waiting to board the flight, Modarjoon bought a scarf that she would wrap around her hair for when they returned.
At night, back in Iran, the battery-operated radio at home would exclaim “Tavajo! Tavajo!” (“Warning! Warning!”) to alert families that the next sound they would hear would be sirens. Airstrikes were underway. It always came around bedtime, Shakiba told me, when they were getting ready to go to sleep. She remembers gathering in the doorway to their patio. They’d all look up at the sky and see stars. “Then one star is moving, and we knew that was the plane dropping bombs,” she said. “It would drop and make that sound–boom–and then we would say ‘Okay, it wasn’t us tonight.’”
Scharam, from Germany, was urging the family to get out of Iran, or at least send the kids over. From what he read in the Western press, things were getting worse. He’s always been family-oriented, but as the eldest son, did he ever have a choice? Upon reflection he told me, “I don’t know, maybe this was my path.” The first child to go was Scharoch, the second-oldest, who joined his brother in Germany in 1979. He had a medical exemption from the draft and was able to get a student visa to travel to Germany. Next was Shahab. He was not able to get a medical exemption, and he was ineligible for a student visa until he had served his term in the army. The war with Iraq was still ongoing, and thousands of soldiers were dying every month. My grandparents decided to smuggle him out of the country. This was expensive. My mother remembers her parents selling their house to pay for a smuggler to take Shahab into Turkey. Scharam would be there to meet him in the city of Van. In Farsi, “Van” means “bathtub.”
“After a couple days,” Shakiba told me, “someone called and said, ‘We were all dirty, we are now showering, we are in the bathtub.’ That was the code to say that we are in the safe city. And I remember that night my mom just dropped the phone and she screamed, like ‘Thank God!’”
The Iranian Revolution had changed many things for many people. In addition to headscarves, women were no longer allowed to attend public athletic events or travel freely; they could not obtain passports without a male guardian’s written permission. The regime lowered the legal age of marriage for women from eighteen to thirteen years old. Around the time that my mom turned thirteen, Scharam began to argue to their parents that she, too, should leave for Germany.
Modarjoon was against it, initially. She was thirty-eight when she gave birth to Shakiba; it was her last chance to have a daughter, but finally she had one. She loved Shakiba. “Her pride was my hair, always,” Shakiba said. “She always used this product to make it shine. If someone said, ‘Oh, Shakiba’s hair is shining,’ it was just her day.” Even her own mother had once said to her, “Don’t let go of Shakiba.” Shakiba’s grandmother had five daughters, and they all married and moved away from her at a very young age. Now Modarjoon was being asked to send her daughter away. Eventually, she relented. Modarjoon told me, “I didn’t want to, but I knew it was the right thing.” My grandfather — Pedarjoon — was also against it. He was still working in Iran and loved his country very much (he still does) so he never planned on leaving. But he too knew he had to let Shakiba go.
They waited until she finished ninth grade, and then they sent her to Germany to visit her brothers “for the summer.” It helped that three of her brothers were already living there (Schapour, the fourth, had decided to stay in Iran, for now) and that her favorite cousin had also recently moved there. But her parents didn’t think she would be moving for good; they hoped all of their kids would return, eventually, when the situation in Iran was better.
Shakiba was excited to move to Germany. Her parents were older and naturally stressed from the tense times they lived through for so many years. The apartment they’d move to after selling the old house felt empty. The war was still going on. When it came time to move to Germany, Shakiba didn’t resist. She was eager to see her brothers. She flew to Germany alone.
The first few weeks were very exciting and new. Shakiba went from Iran’s Islamic Republic, where women and girls had to cover themselves in public, to living with her brother and his girlfriend, Iris, who was Icelandic, and only seven years older than she was. After a little while, though, she began to feel homesick. “It just started, everybody’s going to work, and I’m home,” Shakiba said. It was summertime, and she didn’t have much to do. “And I’m only allowed to speak German or listen to German, no Persian music, nothing.” It was the family’s decision to cut contact with anything and everything that would remind her of Iran. “It was cutthroat,” Shakiba said. The neighbor’s son, a Turkish boy named Türker, would come by after school to help teach her German. But that was the only other person, besides her family, that she was exposed to. Everyone thought it would be easiest for Shakiba to settle in if she went cold-turkey: forget Iran completely and be plunged entirely into her new life.
Scharam and Iris lived in a one-bedroom apartment located above a hair salon they owned, so Shakiba would sleep in the living room on a mattress that she would fold up and slide under Scharam and Iris’s bed every morning. Soon she started going to school, and Iris would cook meals for them, Icelandic food — mostly fish — and one meal they loved with ground beef cooked onto a slice of toast with melted cheese over it. Shakiba was usually responsible for cleaning up the dishes, and there were always so many.
In many ways, Iris played mom for Shakiba. While Scharam would make most of the decisions regarding what she was allowed to do and where she was allowed to go, Iris was there as a friend too. “She kind of broke my walls,” Shakiba said. “She talked about boys and feelings, and I remember it would make me uncomfortable.” She never had these kinds of conversations with her mom, or any other woman. “But then she really never gave up.” Iris became her friend, confidante, and, in some ways, something more.
After a month and a half, Modarjoon and Pedarjoon came to visit. Shakiba was very excited — this was the longest she’d ever been away from them. Iris bought her a new dress to wear to the airport. It was a white t-shirt dress with a pink balloon skirt on the bottom and an open back, so Shakiba didn’t wear a bra. Going bra-less wasn’t something anyone cared about in Germany, but when her parents saw her, they had a bad reaction. “For them, coming from Iran, it was like a huge difference seeing me leave Iran with a hijab and all that, and then all of a sudden no bra,” my mom said. “My dad got so upset, he never hugged me. He was just ignoring me. He said, ‘What is this?’ And then he gave me my mom’s hijab to cover me.”
Modarjoon did hug her, but then pulled her aside and said, “Why do you dress like that? You should have covered.”
Shakiba said that her parents spoke with Scharam and told him that he needed to make better decisions. After that, he was a lot stricter with her, not that he necessarily wanted to be — Scharam himself had been well-adjusted to life in Germany and enjoyed its freedoms — but because of their parents. Shakiba found an escape through Iris. “When I needed something, when I wanted something, I was going to Iris,” she said. “My mom was just a guest that came from Iran.”
T here have always been patriarchal ideals in the Iranian family. As a result, a closer relationship between mothers and their daughters was formed. “Functioning as confidantes, daughters provide an emotional outlet where the mother creates a new family of her own, separate from the father and the in-laws,” Mahnaz Kousha wrote in her 1997 book Ties that Bind: Mothers and Daughters in Contemporary Iran.
In Iran, the relationships between members of a family are very close. Even the extended family — distant cousins, aunts, and nephews — are often involved in decisions and conversations that might usually be left to just parents. Iranian families, both pre and post-revolution, have relied on the patriarchy. In her article “Change and the Iranian Family,” Vida Nassehi-Behnam describes thirteenth century scholar Nasir-e od-Din Tusi’s conception of the Iranian household; it does not, according to Nassehi-Behnam, “refer to a house built of bricks, mud, stone, or wood.” Rather, the household encompasses “a specific cooperation between a man and a woman, parents and children, master and servants, a house and a particular wealth, whether the house is built of wood or stone and whether it is a tent or a villa.” Nassehi-Behnam also says that the traditional Iranian family is patriarchal, placing all of the value on the eldest son, the father, and any other elder male figures. Sons, especially the eldest one, are almost always expected to protect, defend, and help raise their siblings. Alireza Nikbakht Nasrabadi and his fellow authors explain this in their 2016 study, “Exploring Gender-Based Sibling Roles: A Qualitative Study on Contemporary Iranian Families.” These ideals have historically been fundamental to the Iranian family. However, the study also found that “although participants stressed the physical-psychological support role for siblings of both the genders, they tended to view the ‘emotional support’ role as a distinctive role for sisters and ‘financial support’ as a role for brothers.”
Generally, Iranian families stay together and live in one home until one of the children gets married and moves out. For the son, rather than move, they could stay at home and bring their new wife into their parents’ home. It wasn’t strange at all for grown children to live at home and look after their parents until they got married.
The Iranian family dynamic was disrupted by the Revolution, when a group of Islamic fundamentalists, led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, overthrew the Shah of Iran, who had been reinstated by the US following a coup d’etat in 1953. In the spring of 1979, the Islamic Republic was established. Just one year later, Iran entered a war with a US-backed Iraq, over land, which would last until 1988.
Following the revolution and the establishment of the Islamic regime, life for women and girls changed dramatically. According to Hoda Mahmoudi’s 2019 article, “Freedom and the Iranian Women’s Movement,” during his reign, the Shah tried his best to promote progressive women’s rights, but Khomeini was more interested in bringing women back to “traditional values.”
While some were happy with the return to traditional values and ideals, others, like Scharam, believed that Iran was no longer a place for a young girl. Many made the tough decision, if they had the option, to send their children away. While Modarjoon was traditional in some ways — at least how I’ve known her as my grandmother — she never wanted her daughter to be suppressed.
A few years after Shakiba graduated from high school, in 1992, she began an apprenticeship at Scharam and Iris’s hair salon. As she learned to dye hair and cut it properly, she noticed a man who would come in every other week or so for a haircut. Attila Nikfardjam — also known as dad, to me — had his eyes on Shakiba. When Scharam found out, he invited him for dinner to their apartment to interrogate him. Modarjoon knew of him, but, in the end, it was Scharam that gave their relationship the green light. On their first date, in complete defiance of Scharam’s instructions, Shakiba did most of the talking. She told Attila that she was young and her cousin got married so young, which she found crazy, and that she was nowhere near getting married. They were engaged within four months and married the following year.
Around this time, Scharam and Iris had their first child, so Modarjoon and Pedarjoon visited Germany more often. Pedarjoon was retired and they were able to get a visitor visa, which made it easier to travel back and forth. Modarjoon was happy to have all her family in one place again. But, in 2000, Attila decided that he was ready to move back to North America. He wanted to raise his family in Canada, where he grew up. Modarjoon was devastated. At last, all of her children and grandchildren were together. Even Schapour had moved in 1990. She had already been separated from her daughter once, and now, she would be separated from her for a second time. And this time felt different for Modarjoon. She had no choice but to send her daughter away during the revolution — it was for her safety. In this case, Shakiba was making the decision to leave her.
Following their move, Scharam and Iris separated, and their kids moved with Iris to Iceland, all of which made Modarjoon’s heart ache terribly. Shakiba felt as though her mother blamed her. “She told me, ‘When you left, everything fell apart,’” Shakiba said. “I don’t think she meant to hurt me. But she really thought that way.” That feeling of blame sat heavy with Shakiba, and, as a result, what was left of her relationship with Modarjoon suffered. When she did move, to the US, and then later Canada, she felt alone, maybe for the first time. No Modarjoon, no Iris, no brothers. Her kids and husband were all that she had to occupy herself with.
“My family was away from me,” Shakiba said. “My friends were not there. My career wasn’t there. All I had were my two kids and my husband. So, this deep bond of being a family and being always with my kids was just most important and the biggest thing for me.”
Elizabeth Laney and her colleagues explored the changes that motherhood imposes on a woman’s identity in their 2015 study “Becoming a Mother: The Influence of Motherhood on Women’s Identity Development.” They discovered that women “lost themselves for a time while incorporating their children into their identities and reforming their identities.” Shakiba told me that she always wanted a closer relationship with her own daughters. Was it because of the closer girlfriend-esque relationship she had with Iris, or because she was lacking that relationship with her own mother? I don’t know. We all play a role in each other’s identity, and it’s always hard to say what kind.
By the time my sister, Vivien, and I were starting school, my mother said she started feeling depressed. She said she was confused by the feeling and so she went to see our family doctor to talk about it. After being asked a series of questions, Shakiba discovered something about herself.
“‘Duh!’” she remembers thinking. “‘I am missing my childhood and my mom.’ It was just like a little movie was going back. I actually did not have a mom. I never acknowledged that. I just accepted it because there was no choice, there was no option. So I never grew up like every other girl in my class in high school in Germany. Or in North America. I never went to piano lessons. And my mom never picked me up as I picked you up. And I did everything for you guys. And I think the thing that made me most depressed was like, ‘I’m doing the right thing. Why does everybody think it’s wrong?’”
My mom once told me that my cousins used to say, “Desiree could get away with murder!” It wasn’t so much a jab at me, but at my mom. To them, and others, my mom often seemed so overbearing and protective that she would even cover up a crime as awful as murder. She was what some call a “helicopter mom.” To this day, I’m still not sure what my cousins meant by this. Is it wrong to have a mother that would love you and protect you no matter what?
M y relationship with my mother always felt different from the relationships I saw between other mothers and daughters. Growing up, we talked about everything — boys, and periods, and schoolwork, and our futures. Then we’d find ourselves talking about the fact that we talked about everything. By the end of it, we were so exhausted from talking that any extra words would only cause confusion. My mom is very open with my sister and me, so I always thought of her less like a mother, and more like a friend. My friends at school used to laugh at me because they thought I couldn’t do anything without consulting my mother. I’d scoff and think: When you have someone who you can fully trust, wouldn’t you also consult them? I can, in hindsight, admit that it may have been strange that I would FaceTime my mom in the dining hall during my first year of college to ask her what I should eat. But to me, it was normal. I trusted her opinion on things. This woman had cooked every meal for me growing up; she knew what was right for me.
I’m grateful that I had such a protective mother. But at times protective becomes overly involved, and then it becomes difficult to draw a line in the sand. Now that I’ve lived on my own for a little while, I’ve seen and done things that a mother probably shouldn’t know about. Once I do start sharing more details, she feels comfortable giving her uncensored, and sometimes unsolicited, opinions. She is my mother, after all — if there was a single person who felt the need to give their honest opinion, it would be her. Although my friends might share their thoughts, none of us really knows what we’re doing, and therein lies the role of my mother. But my mother, a fifty-one year old woman who has been married for thirty years and has two grown daughters, has an outlook on boys and relationships that is a little different from that of a friend my age. For example, my definition of dating is a little different from my mom’s. My friends understand why I continue seeing someone who I might not see a future with. We call it casual dating. My mother has a hard time understanding this.
I saw a very different mother-daughter relationship during COVID-19, when Modarjoon and Pedarjoon came to live with us. Modarjoon’s mobility has significantly decreased, and it was hard for her sons to help her. So my mom decided they would be more comfortable living with her in Canada. Shakiba was happy to help — it also happened to be the longest period of time that she lived with her parents since leaving Iran.
While I was happy to spend more time with my grandparents, some of my strongest memories from that time are of my mother yelling at Modarjoon. It wasn’t yelling in the way some might think, but rather constant nagging that I found to be very antagonizing and somewhat annoying. First, my mom throws a fit over Modarjoon forgetting to take one of her pills at breakfast, then she’s upset with the way Modarjoon organizes her jewelry. Next, she is ridiculing Modarjoon for the tone she takes with my grandfather — her husband of over seventy years. It was always something.
I found it strange that my mom was so comfortable yelling at her mom the way she did. I thought to myself: “I could never yell at my mom like that!” She and I couldn’t even handle a confrontation without needing to take a timeout. It’s not like we never argue, but I was getting exhausted by how easily my mother could be triggered — three or four times a day, I could hear her nagging or yelling at her mom. It confused me even more when I considered my own relationship with my mom. Because it was closer, partly due to her constant presence in my life, I didn’t feel right yelling at her. So then how did my mom feel so comfortable snapping at this eighty-five-year-old woman whom she hardly grew up with?
I suspected, correctly it seems, that it was because she missed a crucial part of the mother-daughter relationship growing up. Instead of going through that awkward teenage phase, she was going through that awkward teenage phase as a woman in her late forties. Or maybe it was just COVID-19 and quarantine, and the fact that all of a sudden, she was stuck in the house with five other people (my sister also moved back home.) Or maybe it was the fact that this woman, who is her mother, was now playing the role of mother after having been absent for so long. But it was too late; Shakiba had already lived most of her life without her mother’s guidance, whereas I, on the other hand, have had enough to fill three lifetimes — and it still won’t be enough. Maybe my mother looked at her mother with resentment for sending her away? It’s true she wanted to leave home, but she was young and couldn’t have known the consequences. Modarjoon, on the other hand, also couldn’t have known. And when you’re faced with war and an oppressive government, do you have any other choice? I ask these questions without a real answer. But when I asked my mother if she would have made the same decision with me that her mother made with her, she said yes.
The role of a mother is one that is ever changing: it is her natural born job, and one that is meant to come with instinct and ease, and one that she cannot fail at — or do correctly — depending on whom you ask. A mother will always believe she did what was best for her child, and Shakiba wouldn’t say that Modarjoon failed as a mother by sending her away and thus severing their connection, but she admits sometimes she has this feeling: “What did she do for me?” She had to learn how to do things for herself; like cooking and cleaning and decision-making. Even though she had her brothers, and Iris to guide her, no one could truly replace the role of her mother. Shakiba didn’t really have a choice to leave Iran — and her mother — and yet she made the best of it. Shakiba became the woman she is, and the mother she is, without Modarjoon. But it was exactly Modarjoon’s sacrifice of sending her daughter away that allowed Shakiba to become the mother she is to my sister and me. “For a little while I was maybe mad that ‘Why did they do that?’” Shakiba said. “Why did they take this childhood away from me? Or my time with her being at home, being a regular kid, teenager,” she said. “But then I realized, being a mother now, what tremendous pain she went through.”
Shakiba still nags Modarjoon. I hear it now and then on our FaceTime calls. It will likely never stop. Just like I’ll never stop oversharing with my mom, and simultaneously never be able to handle her opinions. There will always be some things that aren’t made for a daughter to share with her mother. In some ways, we have been forced to create walls that Modarjoon and Shakiba never wanted to be built around them. But maybe that’s just mothers and daughters. I’m only curious to know what my relationship with my daughter will be — one day.
