I stayed on that floor for several hours, reading every single letter in that folder. My mother—the woman I called Grandma—had fled from Iran during the early 1970s. The reason: she had fallen deeply in love with a man her strict family had forbidden her from marrying. He was a journalist who was being targeted by the regime. She managed to escape the country; he did not. She gave birth to her daughter—me—alone in a refugee shelter in Greece.
She was scared, alone, and had no way to support a baby. In a painful act of sacrifice, she arranged for a distant cousin in the United States to adopt me as a newborn. She then followed, found work as a house cleaner, and stayed close by, watching from the outside.
She waited until I was five years old, then applied to be our family’s “nanny.” My adoptive parents—who were not strangers, but the distant relatives she had spoken of—let her into our home immediately. I never knew the difference.
She never told me directly. Instead, she sent postcards. One every single year, with those cryptic lines that now felt like desperate, silent whispers trying to scream: I am your mother. I’ve always been your mother.
I cried for hours that night—the kind of intense, deep crying that leaves you completely empty. For the next week, I read the letters over and over, calling out of work. It felt too sacred, too unbelievable to share with anyone yet.
Then, a strange thing started to happen. I began to remember things from my childhood. Small, specific moments.
I remembered how she always knew exactly what kind of comfort I needed when I was sick. I remembered the unique lullaby she would hum, a tune I have never heard anywhere else in the world. And I remembered the one time she slapped a man’s hand away from me in the grocery store with a fierce rage that shocked everyone. I used to think she was simply overly strict or overprotective.
Now, I finally understood. She was holding onto me for dear life. She had lost so much and kept losing, quietly, every day. But she never let go of me.
Coming Home:
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