by at Home;Abroad Laughing Without an Accent: Adventures of an Iranian American
So I did what I had to do. I fed him and burped him and cleaned him and took him on walks and tried to get him to nap. Then I fed him and burped him and cleaned him and prayed for him to nap. Then I fed him and burped him and took him on walks and begged him to nap. When he finally did take a nap, I should have rested, since that would be his only nap, but instead I answered the siren song of laundry.
Laundry, oh sweet laundry. I could, at any time during the day or night, be putting clothes in the washing machine, taking clothes out of the washing machine, and putting them in the dryer, folding the ones I had previously taken out of the dryer and deposited in a pile somewhere, or else putting the folded clothes away. I tried my best to make it meaningful. I had read a book about a meditation center where people were given one task, such as chopping bell peppers, for an entire month. This repetition led them to all sorts of enlightening thoughts. Seeking the light, or at least a faint glow, I folded really well. I separated colors. I used the different settings on the washing machine. And at the end of the day, the only thought that entered my head was, “I hate laundry.” Being weak, I even resorted to seeking outside approval. I pointed out my stain-removal victories to my husband: “Remember the oatmeal stain on the onesie? Gone!”
If only doing laundry brought any sort of satisfaction, the lives of mothers across the world would be so much better. But alas, laundry baskets, unlike bank accounts, fill up quickly and empty slowly. Every time I caught a glimpse of my empty laundry basket, I knew what the mailman felt at the end of each day when he looked at his vacant mail bag. The joy is overshadowed by the knowledge that soon there will be something in it, and within a day, possibly hours if bedsheets have to be changed because baby’s digestive track did not like green beans, it will be completely full again.
Maybe in the days of yore, when women went down to the river to wash clothes, they at least benefited from female bonding and communal kvetching. I am not suggesting trading in modern conveniences, but laundry would be more enjoyable in the company of another, and no, those people handing out copies of Watchtower at the Laundromat do not qualify.
My first year as a mother was tough, like one of those births where the baby is facing the wrong way and the doctor decides to manually turn him. In my case, it took about a year for me to get straightened out. Yes, I tried to start conversations in the produce aisle. (“I see you’re buying iceberg lettuce. Remember the seventies, when iceberg was king? Now there’s butter, bibb, frisee, romaine…”)
It didn’t work.
I remember vowing to do upper-arm exercises ten minutes a day.
I didn’t.
I remember wanting to make homemade baby food.
I didn’t.
I remember desperately wanting to be better than who I was.
But every once in a while, I look at my son’s photo album from his first year and all I see is a baby who knew he was loved. I see a baby who was fed, cleaned, and clothed. I see a baby who went on walks around his neighborhood and saw lots of squirrels. I see a baby who loved Persian nursery rhymes (“attal, mattal, tootooleh…”). And I see a baby who did not care that his mom’s buns were not made of steel.
You Had a Bad Day
When our children were one and four, my husband and I purchased a two-bedroom, one-bath fixer-upper. Since we could barely afford the mortgage, moving out of the house during renovations was not an option. Ever resourceful, we decided to build a room and bathroom behind our garage and move in there. Once we were finished with the house, that room would become my parents’ room.
When the renovation started, we moved into our new abode as planned and put most of our belongings in the garage. The room that we were to live in for the next four months held a bunk bed for the kids, a large mattress on the floor, toys, essential dishes, a microwave oven, and piles of clothes. If Zen had an antonym, it would be that room.
Our renovation coincided with my husband’s new job. At the time, Silicon Valley was in the throes of the second gold rush, known as the High-Tech Boom. The mailman, the dental hygienist, everyone but us, was taking a stroll on Easy Street, making money buying stocks in what seemed like random companies making random things. There were even stories of people buying stocks in the wrong companies and still making money. (“I meant to buy Cisco stock but I made a typo. By the time I realized my mistake, I’d made twenty grand!”)
Aside from the unprecedented number of people making vast amounts of money, what was even more amazing about this second gold rush was the demographics of the players. Indians, Iranians, Chinese, black, white, vegetarian, atheist, Jewish, Christian, Muslim—high-tech companies resembled ads for Benetton, although not as good-looking. And like Benetton, the clothing of these pioneers, given to them for free by their companies, all had logos and slogans meant to tantalize and excite all those in the Kingdom of Technology.
“G4 TECHTU!”
“We Achieve 22 Teraflops!”
“Do You Yahoo?”
My husband’s new job was in a start-up company that specialized in “middleware.” On two dozen occasions, using charts and graphs, my husband explained to me what that means. I have no retention on that topic. I hear “middleware,” I see corsets, girdles, and brassieres.
Like all employees of start-ups, a portion of his compensation consisted of stock options, meaning that if the company went public, those stock options could be sold, hopefully for oodles of money. This was the dream that fueled Silicon Valley.
The CEO of my husband’s company was a single Indian man. He had been involved in a couple of fairly successful start-ups, but that wasn’t what he wanted. Bill Gates was the new Gandhi, and this boss’s dreams consisted not of inner balance but of the enormous kind in the bank.
His apartment was across the street from the office, allowing him the luxury of going home only to shower, and not every day. The office was stocked with food and caffeine in various forms, all of which served the same purpose as a ball and chain. The boss even had a small cot in his office, where he spent most nights.
He was certainly not alone in his maniacal zeal for success. Working nonstop and abandoning one’s life were marks of success in the Valley, giving employees bragging rights. No employee worth his stock options would ever claim to want to go home to see the kids before bedtime, or at least not do so openly. Not surprisingly, it wasn’t just the high-tech lawyers in the Valley who did well. Divorce lawyers could not bill fast enough.
But even among crazy dedicated people, my husband’s boss seemed a bit off. He was known for e-mails telling his employees that if they wanted to talk to him, “anytime after 10:00 PM would work.” He also once sent a company memo letting everyone know that all employees were getting December 25 off. Never mind that it’s a national holiday. He continued: December 24 was not a holiday, but, he was giving everyone that afternoon off. The best part, however, was that on Christmas Eve, as we sat down to eat the meal that I, Muslim woman who technically should have had the day off, had prepared by myself, the phone rang. It was crazy boss with a technical question that could not wait.
But we put up with all this because as soon the company went public and everyone bought middleware, whatever the heck that was, we would be on Easy Street and not in a cramped space.
Living in one room had many drawbacks. The worst was that as soon as one person awoke, so did everybody else. Our children, descended not from apes but roosters, made sure that we never missed an early morning.
One Sunday, my son woke up first as always. Within a few minutes, my husband was in the shower, getting ready for the usual Sunday at the office. I got dressed, trying to muster some enthusiasm for the long day that lay ahead of me. I had recently read about a new bagel shop that had opened near our house. I decided this was the day to support a new business.
I put the kids in the double stroller and off we went. It was 6:30 AM.
Not surprisingly, we were the only patrons in the store. We purchased our bagels and sat by ourselves i
n the dining area, which was separated from the rest of the shop by a wall. It was a lovely scene worthy of Norman Rockwell. The bagels kept the children busy while I read the paper, every once in while saying “uh, huh” or “yeah,” to give the kids the impression that I was listening to them. After twenty minutes, they were done. In America, bagels, cars, and behinds are bigger than in other places, so I went to find a container for the remainders. I left my keys on the table with my children.
By then, there were several other patrons in line, so I waited while the lone sixteen-year-old employee filled the orders. Suddenly, I saw my son walking toward me with what looked like blood all over his shirt, face, and sleeves. I knew it wasn’t blood because I had been gone for maybe only five minutes. As soon my son he saw me, though, he started to cry, holding up his hand. It was blood.
Turns out he had been playing with my key chain, which held a small Swiss Army knife in case of emergencies—or in this case, to cause emergencies. He had opened the knife and upon attempting to close it, had stabbed himself near his thumb, which, like the lip area, bleeds a lot. He had tried to wipe the blood by using his shirt, hence the blood all over his shirt and sleeves. He had also tried to wipe his tears, hence the blood on his face. All this in less than five minutes, and his hand was still bleeding.
The two things I retained from nine years as a Girl Scout were “Do not panic” and that Thin Mints taste best frozen. I went to the counter with my son and asked for their first aid kit. One look at my bloody son and it became clear that this employee had never been a scout. “Oh my God!” she screamed and froze.
I reached over the counter, grabbed a pile of napkins, and applied pressure to the cut. It actually worked. The bleeding slowed down. My son’s crying sped up.
I held him close, stroking his hair, which had also gotten bloody, and assured him that it would be all right. Even though our Norman Rockwell morning had turned into a Hieronymus Bosch triptych, everything would be fine now. I took him back to the dining area.
My daughter was gone.
There were two doors in the dining area. One for the bathroom, which she could not have opened by herself, and the other a swinging door leading to the kitchen area, which said, “Employees Only.” I pushed open the swinging door, and there she was, surrounded by the freshly baked bagels she had purloined from the trays she could reach.
I grabbed her and went back to the table with my son, whose bleeding had now stopped but who was looking very pale. I knew I needed to calm him, so I started telling him a story about the monkey that escaped and hid on our balcony in Tehran when I was a little girl. After a few minutes, my son looked at his shirt, then looked at me and said, “There’s so much blood everywhere. I feel…sick.” Then he turned green. I grabbed him and ran out of the store. I flung open the door. Exactly where a welcome mat might have been, he threw up.
When I walked back in the store, the first thing I saw was the employee walking toward me with a mop, a look of horror on her face again.
“I am so sorry,” I said. “We’ll be leaving now.”
I grabbed my daughter, put them both in the stroller, and started to walk home. It was 7:30 AM.
When we arrived home to our one room, I changed my son’s outfit, washed the blood and vomit from his face and arms, changed my own clothes, then put everything in the sink to remove the mélange of stains. My son was still quite shaken, so I put him on the mattress and started to tell him the story about the first time I dropped him off at preschool and how well he handled it and how poorly I handled it. I had told him this story many times and it always made him laugh. It worked this time, too.
Hearing him laugh soothed my own nerves, but then I suddenly remembered my daughter. During the duration of my story, I had been facing my son and the wall and hadn’t heard a peep out of my daughter.
I turned around. In the middle of the room, on our brand new carpet, stood my one-year-old, diaper off, looking very pleased at her output. She had never done this before. She has chosen this day, this moment, to learn to remove her diaper.
I didn’t think of cleaning up the mess. I picked up the phone and called my husband. When I heard his voice, I started to cry, which I usually do only at movies and weddings, watching certain commercials, at graduations, during John Denver songs, and at funerals.
“What’s wrong? Are the kids all right? Did something happen?” he asked, completely panic-stricken.
“I’m not sure where to begin. The kids are all right but it’s a really bad day.”
“I’ll be home,” he said.
My daughter’s gift required professional cleaning.
Shortly thereafter, our renovations were finally finished. We moved back into the main house with its two bedrooms, which now seemed downright chateaulike.
And as for my parents’ room, my parents never slept in it. The first time they saw it, my mother said, “It’s not a part of the house.” She was right. The two were separated by fifty feet.
After we moved into our remodeled home, my husband’s company laid off half of its employees, including him. We didn’t make any money on the stock options, but we did have to pay taxes on them, thanks to something called the Alternative Minimum Tax.
The good news was that whenever our mailman or dental hygienist complained about the taxes they had to pay on their gains, we told them our story and they immediately felt better. We were their Prozac. And maybe that’s the antidote for all bad days: find someone with a worse day. They’re out there.
Past the Remote
Sometime after the birth of our second child, I decided to get rid of our TV. I kept this thought to myself, knowing it would not be embraced by anyone else in my household. Finally, one day, during a commercial break, I shared my idea with the Frenchman, who didn’t like it. “Think about it,” I told him, “we can actually have conversations that last longer than three commercials, raise kids who will be responsible for their own entertainment, and do whatever else humans did before twenty-four-hour TV.”
He didn’t say anything but I knew what he was thinking. “X-Files is just a show,” I added. “Your life will be just as rich without it. And if it’s not, then we have bigger problems than we realize.”
My husband and I had both been raised without TV as a major influence, until we came to America. In Abadan, our home had access to one Iranian station and one from Kuwait, not as many choices as those sophisticated city folks living in Tehran, who actually had two Iranian stations and one American station. In Abadan, we could choose from about seven hours of daily programming, starting from around 4:00 PM until 11:00 PM. We could watch the news, Persian movies from popular artists such as Parviz Sayyad, or American shows such as Ironside, Bonanza, Bewitched, Flipper, Star Trek, Lost in Space, or I Dream of Jeannie, all dubbed in Persian. One of the most popular shows was The Fugitive, which my brothers watched every week, hoping each week that the one-armed man would be caught.
If someone turned on the TV before four o’clock in the afternoon, there was static. After eleven, more static. People were forced to have a life, or at least get some sleep.
I used to watch thirty minutes of American cartoons per week, and I enjoyed it more than any kid I know today who has access to nonstop cartoons. Whoever said less is more had lived in Abadan.
François had been raised in Paris in a family devoted to the daily news. Because of homework and a strict bedtime, he was usually able to watch only the first thirty minutes of most movies on TV. During the first few years of our marriage, he rented a lot of movies and was particularly thrilled to watch beyond the first half hour, all the way to the end.
After much cajoling, my husband agreed to a two-step detox program. Step one involved putting the TV in the garage for one month. François wanted to shorten this step to one week, but I held firm. “Don’t fool yourself,” I told him. “It will take at least a month for Mulder and Xena to leave your bloodstream.”
Step two entailed getting rid of the TV permanen
tly, but only if step one was a total success.
We hauled the TV, VCR, the various remote controls, and the TV cabinet to the garage. Suddenly, our living room looked much bigger, but the air seemed heavier, like the last day of a long vacation.
Our children, like most kids of a certain age, were accustomed to watching public television in the morning. I had never watched Sesame Street or Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood as a child, since they were not broadcast in Iran. It was not until I became a mother that I found myself enchanted by Elmo, Oscar the Grouch, Big Bird, and Fred Rogers and his gentle ways. These shows are a valid reason for having a TV. However, even with quality programming, it’s easy to overdo screen time. If the television screen went blank after Sesame Street and Mister Rogers’, that would be ideal, but it didn’t. There was always another program coming up, and it was always a program that my kids wanted to watch. Needing more time for housework, I wasn’t exactly anxious to turn off the electric babysitter. It’s not as if my children were watching a Jean-Claude Van Damme marathon, but I still felt guilty. Just as too many carrots turn skin yellow, too many TV programs, even the good ones, can turn kids into creatures whose favorite phrase is “Can we see what’s next?”
Once the television disappeared from the house, I prepared myself for the Whine Festival. Surprisingly, the absence of our TV was not met with much dismay from my kids. They immediately found something else to do in the mornings, as if they already had a Plan B but had never had to use it. However, their morning activities now involved me in a way that was more time-consuming than my turning on the TV and leaving the room. If I put the kitchen chairs in the living room, put a blanket over them and called it a tent, I had time to empty the dishwasher and start dinner. If I equipped this tent with empty plastic food containers, wooden spoons, and stacks of towels, I could finish making dinner. If I gave them bananas to peel and mash for banana bread, I had another ten minutes, and a mess. Having a TV was definitely easier, and less messy, but I had a nagging feeling that I would eventually pay for that ease later. I wanted my children to be masters of their own fun, to know that their imaginations were richer than any TV show or computer or video game. I knew that imagination, like any muscle, needs to be exercised, or else one ends up with the mental equivalent of a beer belly. With television, my children often had access to the product of talented writers, actors, and puppeteers, but they were just passive participants. I don’t know if one benefits in any way from just watching a lot of TV. I have never heard of anyone making a deathbed confession: “My biggest regret? Missing season four of Law and Order.”
