Missing you

I used to say I didn't miss people when I knew I was going to see them again, which is an odd thing for someone as sentimental as me to say, but I was likely trying to convince myself more than anyone else. After all, I had plenty of people to miss, everyone, in fact that had been part of my life in the first decade of my existance. My dad, came and went from Canada 7 times until we finally told him not to any more. He clearly didn't want to be here, and my sister and I told him we would rather know he was across the ocean, and happy, than here and depressed. After all, in a marriage, and a family, if one person is down, it brings the whole household down, so thinking back, we were probably saying so partly out of a desire for self-preservation.

Our grandparents were also back home, as were my second cousins Peggy and Nancy, with whom we had pretty much grown up, and Steve, who taught me the true meaning of being bad- which was so much fun! And of course, there was Caroline, my best friend growing up, who was in Iran until she got married and moved to Greece. At my very last-minute goodbye party, which only she attended, I asked her when she thought we would see each other again, to which she replied 25 years. At 10 years old that seemed like an eternity, but she was right, we would not each other for another 26 years.  I had all these people to miss, but I insisted I didn't miss them, even though I would sometimes steal my dad's undershirt when he was here, so I could smell him when he was gone. I miss his smell now that I know I will never smell it again. Yet I "didn't" miss him then. Right!!

I never considered this possibility; missing someone while they are still with you, because my mom is not herself any more and most of the things I did with her that made us a mother and daughter, we cannot do any longer. We used to cook together, bake, sew, watch films that made us both cry- shocking, I know, talk, and argue. I miss all those things mainly because my mom was the first person to really challenge me. She challenged what I thought, and what my surroundings said a woman and wife should be. While all my friends and relatives' mothers sat in Iran next to their husbands who insisted the revolution will blow over, my mom defied her husband's wishes and did what she thought was best for her and her girls, and that wasn't the first time she had done so either.

My mom won the lottery when she was in her 20s. I don't think it was a great deal of money, but it did allow her to go to London and study. She used that money to put herself through school in the 60s, in Iran! No one was burning bras in Iran, and certainly, no one was thinking this is normal behavior for a woman. Even back then, my dad did not want her to go, but she asked him to wait for her and off she went. She was, what we call a home-stay student nowadays with the O'Donnels, who were a sweet couple living somewhere in London and taking in students. Mom studied in secretarial school, tolerated racism from her instructors, but by all accounts had a great time there. She learned English and her courses at the same time, and came back two years later with marketable skills that got her a good job in the oil company in Iran. She also picked up where she had left off with my dad. WHO DID THAT IN THOSE DAYS??? My mom!

She told us stories of the dances she went to in London, the slimy guys that tried to pick her up, and the bullets she dodged. Her eyes would sparkle when she told those stories, and unbeknownst to her and us, she instilled in us the seeds of self-improvement, adventure, and travel. She planned her life to have her adventures, and then follow the status quo, but by our generation the expectations for our sex had shifted. It's no wonder neither my sister or I felt the need to have children. Our mom taught us to make our own status quo, and let the chips fall where they may because they are our chips.

She didn't have my sister until she was 30, which in 1965 was pretty unusual, and I came along 4 years later. From the very beginning I recall my mom saying "You can be anything you want to be", and so when my sister said she wanted to be a physicist, a little revolution wasn't going to get in her daughter's way. The choice was obvious.

I was truly grateful of my mother's decision when I returned to Iran in 1992. I found one of my childhood friends and she took me to see another classmate of ours. Both Armenian and in their 20s like me, they were very curious about my life in Canada, and grilled me with questions for about 20 minutes. Then they began speaking about their in-laws, dinner preparations that night and their husbands. I sat there like a fish out of water thinking how lucky I was to be able to have a different life than that. Had I stayed in Iran, I would not have had much choice as to what I would study and even if I had gone on to university, I would have put that degree away and become a housewife, as had my friends. I realize they were happy with that life, but I knew I would not have been, and more importantly, my mother would not have either. How lucky was I to have had the option, and it was purely because my mom, who had spent two year in London, living it up, was unwilling to narrow the scope for the next generation of women in her family. In all her conservatism and cautiousness, my mom was a bad-ass feminist, and it has taken me 40 years and this blog entry to see that.

So yes, I miss you mom, because I see the confusion in your eyes now, and that determination I am so used to seeing is gone and I know I will never ever see it again.