Author Archives: thirdcultureblog

The Play Date

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A couple of weeks ago, P had her very first play date. Before you pass horrid judgement at the fact that she was almost three before this milestone took place, please let me explain myself.

P was born in the lovely (and expensive) city of San Francisco, and since we knew we wouldn’t be living there permanently, I didn’t bother joining any mommy groups. So I completely missed out on the whole mommy-group camaraderie, as well as the possibility of having women around with kids P’s age.

We ended up moving twice in P’s first three years, so there wasn’t really any time to settle down and find friends with similarly-aged kids. And it turns out that none of my friends who live within a thirty-minute driving radius have kids around P’s age. So that wasn’t an option either.

I was excited when P started preschool, thinking that I’d soon meet other kids’ parents and we would start the whole mysterious cycle of play dates. But meeting said parents turns out to be rather difficult when you all have different drop-off and pick-up times.

So I just figured I’d wait it out until P started going to slumber parties sometime in high school.

One day at school, though, I had a fabulous surprise waiting for me: the mom of P’s BFF had left a note with her email and phone number, asking if we were around during winter break, and if we’d be interested in setting up a play date between P and S.

Interested? I was practically doing a happy dance. I think I was way more excited than P was, because honestly I don’t know that she knew what a play date even was.

After a few backs and forths on email, we decided on a Bat time and a Bat place, and I was to bring drinks (which, in my excitement turned out to be way too many for a two-hour play date). The girls played happily with one another until around lunch time, at which point P got completely cranky and needed some space. Apparently, that’s normal at toddler play dates. So much to learn.

S’s mama and I chatted happily, complained a bit about our preschool, drank yummy tea, and had a lovely snack. And I finally figured out that the play date was as much for our sake as it was for the girls’. So, so much to learn.

The Princess and the P

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I know it’s a bit too late for a post-Halloween post (all the on-the-ball mamas probably did it by midnight of the 31st), but I’m definitely of the better-late-than-never mindset.

This year, P, along with every other girl in her preschool wanted to be a princess. OK, I take that back, I remember seeing a mermaid. And a Princess Leia (Disney’s newest princess?). When I saw the gaggle of children at the Halloween “parade,” aka children wildly running to their parents in excitement as teachers tried to make them walk in a line, my first thought was: why don’t any of the boys want to be prince charming? They were probably having too much fun being firefighters,  Humpty, and Dumpty to worry about rescuing all the girl preschoolers from the clutches of evil stepmothers.

I’ve already chronicled my own issues with Halloween elsewhere, so I’m generally pretty determined that P will have a different Halloween experience. So, donning her Cinderella dress and tiara, she ran around with the other kids, and ate her treats.

I’ll be honest: I had tried my best to have her pick another costume. Super Girl? Doctor? Anything else? The idea that someone of my flesh and blood could be so princess-centric is completely foreign. No one who knows me, even remotely, could ever ever in a million years call me a girly-girl.

Not being a girly-girl is practically unheard of in Iranian culture. Almost every Iranian woman (and I only say almost because I’m thinking of my sister as the other lone exception) wears gobs of makeup, is always immaculately put-together, wouldn’t dare sunbathe in order to keep a clear complexion, is always wearing incredibly trendy clothing, and more likely than not, has had some sort of surgical enhancement, and looks YEARS younger than her husband, even though they are probably the same age. I realize that I’m making incredibly huge generalizations, but I know a lot of Iranian women who fit this bill.

My lack of girly-girl-ness, however, came as a result of growing up in Iran. We moved from Iran when I was nine, and from the time I started school when I was six, I had to wear headgear to cover my hair. My solution, completely endorsed by my parents, who thought having to cover my hair at such a young age was completely ridiculous, was to cut my hair really short and pretend I was a boy outside of school. Minutes after the school bell would ring, I would run out of the building, tear off my headscarf, and sprint home. Ahhh what a heady feeling of freedom.

I got to be so good at pretending I was a boy that a second cousin, who was in the military, was able to sneak me into the military stables and have me hang around with the horses. The obsession with horses, a staple of all girl childhoods, was definitely not lost on me.

Once we got to the U.S., I tried to shed the tomboy tendencies, but it was difficult. I distinctly remember holding the door for an elderly couple at a restaurant, and being thanked in this way, “Thanks, son.” My English was still rocky, but I was shocked at not being recognized as a girl.

So I figured the next step to becoming a “real girl” was acquiring a Barbie. So I shamelessly begged for one. The only one I was allowed to have was Astronaut Barbie, since my mom was not too keen on the whole princess thing.

She did see the error of her ways at some point, though. I may have been the only teenage girl who was begged BEGGED by her mother to wear makeup (this generally happened in a frantic tone in the car as we were going to visit relatives, who were generally really well-put-together Iranian women). I was probably not the first teenage girl to be begged to wear lighter colors (I was no goth, but somehow she thought I was). All to no avail.

What I find fascinating is that my parents are now the princess enablers in P’s life. My mom is getting an early start. There’s no need to pretend P is a boy in America. My mom is definitely getting all the girly-girl potential she lost with me in P.

I generally find it pretty amusing, and despite half-heartedly trying to get P to wear a different Halloween costume, I try not to be too militant anti-princess. P has a pretty healthy curiosity, likes kicking and throwing balls and rolling in dirt as much as any other toddler–boy or girl.

And the following picture also gives me hope. Image

Any girl who goes to an indoor playground, dresses up as a princess and then proceeds to put on a hard hat and play with the Black & Decker toy tool set is probably going to be OK.

On Music

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If you thought that you couldn’t be moved to tears (tears of pain, not laughter) by a cartoon, then you’ve never been an Iranian expat watching Persepolis.The movie-length cartoon, based on the graphic novels (or comic books?) of the same name, tells the story of a young Iranian who lives through the Revolution, moves abroad, moves back to Iran, and goes back abroad again.

There are many poignant and unbelievable scenes, but the one that always makes me dissolve in a pool of tears is the scene in which Marjane is walking around, trying to buy some music illegally on the streets. If you’ve never seen it, here it is on YouTube:

Image

Anyway, many things in the movie seem surreal, but none other than the sight of a teenager on the prowl for some Bee Gees, Stevie Wonder, and “Jichael Mackson.” The scene may be comical (it is), but it is also a really painful snapshot of how things really were in Iran.

For my sister and her cool friends (and by extension, moi, because what little sister doesn’t annoyingly follow everything her older one does?), it was always A-Ha (you may remember my post about Iranians’ obsession with blonds). However, my parents wouldn’t DREAM of having their 13 year-old (my sister, not me) go out and get in trouble by prowling for illegal music. So my mother would take it upon herself to head to the seedy parts of town, asking for any new A-Ha tapes. Little did we know that A-Ha released very little new music after their huge hit, “Take On Me.”

So my mom came back one day with what I believe was a U2 tape…Joshua Tree maybe? You know the song “With or Without You”? The part where the chorus goes “with or without you ahhhhhh haaaaaaaa, I can’t liiiiiiiiiiiive”? Well, I (or was it my sister?) pretty much convinced myself (ourselves?) that the “ah ha” in the middle of the song really meant that the band singing was, indeed, A-Ha. And we would sing along without abandon, with our nonexistent English skills, while my parents (who, you know, actually knew the language) would try to correct us by telling us the real words. All the while we’d continue singing phonetically and declare that they were the ones wrong in their word choice and pronunciation.

That is a very long trip down memory lane, and all things I’ve been thinking about as P gets more and more excited about singing and dancing, and music in general. At this point, I’m leaving all the preschool songs to my parents, while I slowly indoctrinate her in all things Beatles.

This has been surprisingly easy, since there are so many animal-themed Beatles songs. She loves “Octopus’s Garden,” but isn’t that crazy about “Piggies.” “Blackbird” is a bit slow for her, but she tolerates it pretty well since I insist on belting it out at the top of my lungs. Her favorite though? Definitely a non-animal themed song: “Michelle.” She requests it every other day, and insists that I sing it to her every night to say goodnight.

She even knows the words and sings along. Sometimes, she sings by herself. One time, we were walking in San Francisco, and she was singing “Michelle” with very little help from me. We passed a cafe, and a woman looked at P singing, and couldn’t contain her excitement. “Yes,” she said, “start them early!”

She even tries to sing the French parts…you know, “sont le mot qui vont tres bien ensemble, tres bien ensemble.” (Forgive the incorrect spelling, but I’m working on high school French here.) Her French sounds like you would expect a 2 1/2 non-native French person sounding: pretty rough. She basically just mouths the words really theatrically, looking at me with wide eyes to see if she’s saying them correctly.

She probably sounds like my sister and me about twenty years ago, as we tried singing along to U2. The obvious big difference being that instead of going to horrid parts of town and risking arrest to get some music, I just turn on my iPod.

Strange how seeing your child do something triggers a whole flood of different memories from your own childhood. And makes you respect what your parents did when you were growing up.

I’ll try introducing P to A-Ha (maybe) and U2 (definitely). And have my mom tell her stories of what it was like trying to find those tapes in the seedy parts of Tehran.

My Olympic Story

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Disclaimer: The following story has nothing to do with parenting. It has to do with a particular day that happened oh so long ago, in the days before parenting (BP?). I’m sharing it to try to get into the Olympic spirit–difficult to do when our TV has zero reception so we can’t see NBC. 

It’s a little bit about the Olympics, but more importantly, it’s about traffic in Rome. 

We were living in Rome in 2004, the year the Summer Olympics were held in Athens. At the time, I was finishing up school and working on the side as a translator. A friend of mine, a fellow ex-pat (and avid runner), was working for the Rome Marathon organization. It turned out that people from the Rome Marathon were going to help the International Olympic Committee to welcome the Olympic flame as it touched down in Rome and started winding its way to Athens. 

And they needed an Italian/English translator to facilitate communications between the international crew bringing the flame to Rome and the Roman crew that was on the ground receiving the flame. 

For some reason, my friend had a previous engagement and couldn’t take part as the translator/facilitator–so I was the lucky recipient of the coveted temporary post. 

And that is how I found myself waiting on a street corner at 6 a.m. one morning, wearing semi-formal work clothes (I believe I was wearing a skirt), waiting for a car to pick me up and whisk me off to the airport to wait for the arrival of the Olympic flame. The other three were wearing sporty Rome Marathon shirts and comfortable shoes. I felt a bit out of place.

I got in with three Marathon staff and started speeding towards Rome’s smaller airport, Ciampino (used for European and internal Italian flights). Traffic going out of town wasn’t horrible, but all four of us were groaning at the prospect of taking the flame back to the city center later that morning. Traffic going into town was, as usual, horrid. 

We got to the tarmac and a few minutes later the plane landed. The mayor gave a rousing speech, and the Olympic flame made its way down to a waiting vehicle. Final destination: Stadio Olimpico, where the first runner was going to carry it through the city. 

My job was pretty easy…told some people to place boxes here and there, and was free to observe the rest of the time. 

Then it was time to accompany the flame downtown. My coworkers and I were grumbling about having to face the traffic when we saw the first motorcycle cops. Who were followed by a litany of other motorcycle cops. It was a motorcade for the Olympic flame.

And it turned out we were the first car in the motorcade. 

Stunned silence descended on the four of us. Which quickly led to hysterical giggling. 

Anyone who has lived in (or even visited) Rome, has seen the daily motorcades that accompany visiting dignitaries and Italian government officials. It soon becomes the most irritating thing to watch yet another motorcade of 30 cars zoom by, stopping traffic and generally being a pain in the arse. 

Those annoyances vanish when you are the one in the motorcade. 

We started out of the airport and met with very little traffic. The cops were waving us along, and there we were in our little FIAT, wide eyed and in thrall of the powerful feeling of police accompaniment. 

When we hit the actual city limits, the feeling was even more pronounced. A trip that normally would have taken an hour was coming to an end in about 20 minutes. It was like Moses parting the seas…the cops had their drill down, stopping, waving us through, angering the general public, and rushing  back to the front to repeat. 

The giggling in the car never stopped, and we had a profound sense of sadness once we actually reached our destination. Who knew if any of us would ever actually experience that again? 

Our work done for the day, we parted and went our separate ways. I had to take public transport to get back home (gasp!). It was quite a shock to the system after having traveled in style. 

Moral of the story? Even if a job is going to net you 40 euros, take it. Because you may end up in a motorcade with the Olympic flame, which will definitely be one of those stories I’ll tell my grand kids. 

I’ll Put it on My Eyes

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My family had been living in the U.S. for just over a year when we moved into an incredibly cute duplex in a working class town 20 miles south of San Francisco. The house had a front yard filled with wood chips, a sunny eat-in kitchen, and hardwood floors throughout.

We had moved to Northern California from Irving, Texas, not too long before. In Texas, we first lived at my aunt’s house (for…two months? Three? The details are fuzzy) and then a hopelessly depressing apartment.

So the duplex in San Leandro was definitely a step up. And we had an awesome view: the house across the street. It was one of those beautifully refined Craftsman-style houses–incredibly well-kept and sporting a fantastic yard.

The man who lived there was, in every sense, quite neighborly. He was always out in his yard with a huge sun-hat, perfecting the garden, waving hello as we walked or drove by.

We hadn’t been there very long when he knocked on the door one day, presenting my dad with a huge basket of vegetable-garden bounty. I remember there were zucchini, tomatoes, and cucumbers.

My father, already an emotional man, was over the moon. He started praising the vegetables, our neighbor, America in general, and ended with “Thank you so much. I’ll put them on my eyes.”

Our neighbor wasn’t really sure what to make of this, and said something to the effect of, well, I guess you can do that, but it’s probably better if you eat them.

You see, my dad was literally translating a common saying in Farsi. The phrase, which is said when one person gives another something of value, literally means “I’ll put the [insert gift here] on my eyes.” But the real meaning is that the gift is so precious that I’ll put them on my most precious possession, my eyes (well, something to that effect anyway). It’s just a very flowery way of saying thank you.

That little sentence has fueled my love for all things involving literal translations. They are a fantastic, albeit nerdy, source of amusement.

Fast-forward 20 years, as I try valiantly (and often fail) to sing P lullabies that are actually lullabies, and not Tori Amos or Simon & Garfunkel songs. This is how bad I am–until recently, I would finish “Hush Little Baby” in this way:

If that looking glass don’t shine
Mama’s gonna buy you a concubine.

Every night I would think, what if she asks me what a concubine is tonight? So when I remembered, I would use “porcupine” instead. I pretty much learned how to correctly end that song while watching Skylar singing it to her newborn baby on Breaking Bad. (Ohhhhhhhhh Daddy loves you and so do I!)

So when an Italian friend and his American wife, back from a trip to the Ye Olde Country, gave us a book of traditional Italian nursery rhymes and lullabies, I was super excited. If I can’t teach P all the right American songs, at least A can teach her Italian ones.

And then I saw the songs and rhymes.

And they are ripe for a literal translation.

Here’s the first (please excuse my shoddy translations and lack of rhyming. It’s been a while):

Under the Baracca Bridge,

Little Gigin is pooping.

His poop is really, really hard,

So a doctor came to measure it.

He measured thirty-three,

Now it’s your time to count!

It needs to be said: wha? A nursery rhyme about pooping? Really hard, worrisome poop that needs doctor intervention? This may be the best nursery rhyme ever!

Well, that’s what I thought until I read this next one:

Bam-bada-dam-badam-badam

Three little owls on the dresser

Were making love to the doctor’s daughter

The doctor got really really mad

Bam-bada-dam-badam-badam.

OK. WHAT? This is a nursery rhyme? About three owls having sex with the doc’s daughter? Who, rightfully so, gets mad? I mean, wouldn’t you if three owls were having sex with your daughter? All I can say is, leave it to the Italians to come up with a nursery rhyme that involves sex.

A laughed hysterically when he saw these rhymes in the book. I guess it’s one thing to hear them said over and over again, and it’s completely different to see them written on paper.

Well, K and M, friends who brought back the book from Italy: I love it. I’ll put it on my eyes.