My Divorce, My Father, My Mistake (original) (raw)
Magazine|My Divorce, My Father, My Mistake
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/16/magazine/my-divorce-my-father-my-mistake.html
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Credit...Illustration by Melinda Josie
- Oct. 14, 2016
I told my father about my divorce after midnight on a bus from Chicago to Iowa City. There was no sense postponing it; he was calling from Isfahan, Iran, and we spoke only every few months. He struggled for a response, his deep voice faltering. “Will you be O.K.?” he asked. “Do you have money?” In Iran, a divorced woman in her 30s might never marry again, and if she does, she may not do as well. She probably won’t have children, and if she already does, they are legally her husband’s. Her property might vanish. The notion of the happy divorced woman just doesn’t compute.
He quoted Rumi, telling me I would be happy again. I could almost hear the little clicks of his green counting beads as he rotated them between thumb and forefinger. This chain, which he carries everywhere, contains 33 beads — the number of arches under Isfahan’s Si-o-Seh Bridge; the age of the inhabitants of heaven, according to some Muslims; and my age at the time of my divorce.
I’ve seen my father only four times since my mother, brother and I escaped from Iran in 1987. He has a thick mustache, a cane with a silvery animal head and a deep admiration for Mevlevi verse. He is a dentist and a pleasure-seeker, but a villager nonetheless, and set in his ways; he can barely travel outside Iran with his rusty English and inability to stomach anything other than Persian kebabs. (Though on one visit, he did develop a weird affection for Caesar salads.)
After that conversation on the bus, he stopped calling. I blamed his village attitude toward divorce. Other members of my conservative family also stopped talking to me around then, and for two years, while I was marooned in Iowa for graduate school, my only family was my mother, who phoned and wrote me from her stint in Thailand every chance she got.
Sometimes I saw my father on Facebook. Mostly he posted poetry. Now and then he uploaded photos of beautiful women, perhaps thinking he was saving them. I sent him angry messages in capital letters: “Baba, DON’T PUT ANYTHING ON FACEBOOK!! You don’t understand it!!” Once, he tagged himself in a photo of me and a girlfriend. Later he shared a video of my Iowa classmates singing around a bonfire. Convinced he had confused these actions with liking, I wrote him another angry message: “Baba, what are you doing???? Don’t share my friends’ videos!!! Delete delete!!” He didn’t respond.
Years later, I fell in love again. And I became pregnant. My partner and I weren’t married, but we were delighted to become parents. We were both divorced and nomadic and had long shed any programmed notions of success and happiness. But judgment came from unexpected places. Some Western women chastised and lectured me. Stunned, I didn’t tell anyone in Iran.
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