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The Guardian Archive Long Read.

Hi, my name is Dina Nayeri, and I'm the author of Foreign Mother's Foreign Tongues.

In another universe, she could have been my friend, which was published in the Guardian Longuaries in 2023.

Well, this was a personal essay that I wrote about my relationship with my mother and how it's evolved over the years.

My mother and I were both born in Iran and we left when she was in her 30s and I was eight.

And so there was this kind of widening culture gap that formed over the decades.

As I became a Western woman, she remained an Iranian woman and, you know, her expectations

of what motherhood would mean to an adult daughter. And my expectations as an American and then how

those carried forward with when I became a mother. I wrote the piece because, you know, obviously

there was so many sort of memories that came up when I became a mother about the kind of mother that I experienced.

And because we were refugees and displaced, my formative years were really majorly trauma years.

And so I was a little worried when I became a mom.

But I think this particular topic really came up when we moved to France in 2019 and my daughter was put in a French

school she was only three years old and you know instantly she learned French and

had this accent and sort of assimilated so quickly as children do.

And then she started looking at me as the foreign mother.

And it reminded me exactly of that time when I was eight years old.

And we came to America and I quickly became American and she was the foreign mother.

And there was this widening distance between us.

And I didn't want her to say anything, you know, in English or to be around my friends

or anything that would show her Iranianness because I was so embarrassed with that. And just to watch

...