The Two Women Who Broke My Heart
A scenic journey through joy, pleasure, pain, and despair.
Hey!
My sister, Anousheh, texted me the picture above (I’m about 6) and it set me off on a true drug binge: An entire day of free-basing chocolate covered toffee and brioche bread. 😵💫 (And yes, my drugs of choice are weak…yet potent. You may relate.) But no joke, I ate so much fucking toffee, I literally passed out asleep.
That little girl in the picture was having one of the Top 3 days of her life.
It was about a week before my birthday, and I had gone grocery shopping with my mother and 21-year-old sister, Anousheh. When my sister put the bags in the trunk of our brown Buick Skylark, I immediately noticed something was off. It bothered me enough that I insisted they open the trunk again. They pushed back, but I wouldn’t take no for an answer. Reluctantly, they opened the trunk and stood back, somewhat defeated, while I investigated. Under the groceries, under a blanket was a box which contained...this magnificent Barbie Dream House. (I’m not sure if it was Barbie-branded but you get the picture.) I felt pure unadulterated joy! High octane pleasure that I felt in every molecule of my existence. (I don’t know about you – but today I have to work hard to be able to experience such full-bodied pleasure. Usually, a voice comes in to dull it, block it, or at least temper it. I’m working on getting back to my factory settings on the pleasure front. I have faith I’ll get there.). I made my sister assemble it the moment we got home. She had things to do, but I wasn’t having it any other way.
My heart is so full for that demanding little girl who knew exactly what she wanted and had no qualms asking for it. I admire her spunk and commitment. I still have that spunk and commitment but I often “feel bad” pushing for what I want. (Don’t worry, I still do it. But I’m aiming to get back to those original factory settings.) My heart is also full for my mother and sister who had the beautiful intention to surprise me with such a mind-blowing gift and continued to indulge me when I foiled their surprise. Frankly, they still indulge me. Even with things like this project. I’m sure there’s a part of them that stands back somewhat reluctantly and defeated as I investigate and unfurl these sometimes uncomfortable memories. I’m grateful they let me be me. But back to that day: I felt like a Queen and you can see it in my smile. 👑
That was a good year.
That same year, Santa visited my house for the first time. I woke up Christmas morning expecting another typical day, so you can imagine my surprise when I saw the brightly colored packages under the tree. We had just moved from Iran to America, a few years prior and I just wasn’t fully aware of all the various American traditions yet. My. Mind. Blew. A. Fuse. Santa had even accidentally dropped a bottle of bubbles in the fireplace when he was going back up the chimney. To be honest, I was wide-eyed and a little nervous when I showed my sister. I earnestly wondered how we could get it back to him. And I just couldn’t believe my luck when she said if he left it, that meant I could keep it. I had never experienced anything like this before. It was truly the single most magical moment of my entire life.
So you can imagine how psyched I was the following Christmas Eve.
I was no longer a Christmas virgin and, in fact, I would call me a Christmas nympho. I kept asking my mom, what do you think he’s bringing me? What do you think he’s bringing me? I was guessing ad nauseum about what treasures Santa had in store for me that year. Would he accidentally drop something in the chimney again? The possibilities were simply tantalizing and all my synapses were firing. My mother, by contrast, was very quiet and somewhat weary all night. I only realize this in retrospect, because I was too high on Santa to notice at the time. But at the end of the evening, after dinner and her tasks were done, she told me to come in the car with her. We drove to Toys ‘R Us. It didn’t quite register what we were doing until she explained, with resignation, that we were buying my Christmas presents. This was my first time at Toys ‘R Us, but any amazement about the rows and rows of every toy imaginable under one roof was muted by my confusion and the lump of coal in my throat.
I deduced the obvious: There was no Santa Claus.
In a trance, I quickly picked some toys. I just wanted to go home. I wanted to feel these feelings privately. My heart breaks for the little girl who believed in everything, then nothing, over the course of one day. My heart also breaks for the mother who was clearly going through something hard. Who seemed all alone in the parenting game at that moment and clearly in over her head. Today, I understand the source of my mother’s impotence: My older sister had been the magician behind the dollhouse and prior Christmas extravaganza.
That September, she had gone away to Medical School. Her exit had a profound impact on our lives, I realized long after the fact. And this isn’t just a story about my Santa bubble popping. That was just a memory pitstop to our final destination.
Flashback to 3 months before that fateful Christmas. My mother woke me early and said we were going on a road trip with my sister. Like a golden retriever, I was so excited to get in that car! A road trip! That meant a McDonald’s stop on the highway and uninterrupted time in the car with my favorite person, Anousheh! She was the one person in my family who really saw me. She was fun. Effervescent. Beautiful. Stylish. Warm. Loving. When we ran errands together, I walked so proudly, knowing (hoping!) people would think I was her daughter. That day, we drove from Long Island to Washington DC. in one long haul. I didn’t really ask why we were going. But when we got there, I was told, we were taking her to Med School. We saw her room. We met her nice roommate, Andrea. I must seem thick but it took until it was time to say goodbye for me to fully understand that we were going back to New York without her. Without her? She was my person. It was so confusing to me. I could see how excited she was. And now that I’m an adult, I can understand how hard it was for her to be the only fluent English speaker in our family. She had quarter-backed the whole transition to America for us even though she had just been 18! Of course, she was excited to get away from all that responsibility.
But it felt like they were taking my mother away.
She was my everything. I had absolutely no preparation for this moment. No idea she was leaving home. No idea we were leaving her there. I was on a need-to-know basis in my home and clearly this was not something they felt I needed to know in the days and weeks before we dropped her off. I was crying so uncontrollably, her roommate brought out bobby pins to start clipping my hair back, subconsciously knowing this child needed some level of care she wasn’t receiving. My mother couldn’t be there for me. I was experiencing despair…abject desperation. My mother seemed annoyed…inconvenienced, but as a mother today myself, I can see how that was a defense mechanism. It must have hurt that going home with her was of absolute no comfort to me…That my sister was my spiritual and psychological mother. That they were ripping my mother from me and that mother was not her. I kept every bobby pin Andrea put in my hair that day. I kept every tissue I cried into. I put these all into a little Japanese case that Andrea gifted me in her effort to soothe me. These are still sitting somewhere in my mother’s home, filled with the energy of a little girl who lost her safe maternal figure and was about to embark on a life-long journey of learning how to build safety and security within herself.
I was first molested the following year.
Today, I have such a complicated relationship with these women. A deep abandonment wound blocks a close connection with my sister though, admittedly, she did nothing wrong. She was not my mother…and yet because of my mother’s emotional limitations… she was my mother. And my actual mother: What she lacked in her ability to sit with hard feelings, she made up for by busting her ass for us. She was born a super fancy, somewhat entitled woman who had never worked a day in her life. But when we moved to America and my dad’s health and our financial circumstances went sideways, my mother rose up. She supported us on 25K a year. Three kids through college, two through grad school. All my work ethic comes from that woman.
But it’s complicated.
Of course, I see the good. The pure love for my sister. The magic she brought to my life. The respect for my mother. The resilience she taught me. But it doesn’t erase what’s hard. And so I grieve for the little girl whose ability to experience joy and pleasure was snatched away in that moment. I cheer for the grown up who is finally learning how to ease into joy and pleasure. I love and respect my mom and my sister. And yet I am simultaneously so afraid of them. Although we are in relationship, I brace myself at every interaction.
And that’s where I’m at now. I don’t have a perfect bow to tie up the whole mother and sister story. I deeply want to feel loved by them and to love them. I know they love me the best they know how. But there’s a still a wall on my end. I visit it often. And I will continue to do that. I visit it like I would visit a grave, but it’s a grave for the living. I will sit at that wall with the intention of allowing their love in again. I know they are right on the other side. And hopefully one day, while they are both alive, something will shift in me and I will walk through that invisible wall into their arms. I’m just not there yet. And so, I sit at the grave for the living. Thank you for sitting with me.
I hope some of what I share will help you look at your own coming of age differently. Coming of age is not just for the young. It’s a way of looking at our past so we can better understand our present. I could just list superficial reasons why my mom and sister annoy me today. Or complain about how no one ever gets me a gift that truly lands (it was the source of a lot of frustration for my husband) and just stick to the narrative that they obviously just don’t “get” me. But unpacking these easier-to-bury memories gives me a more accurate view about the things that jam me up, so that I can, in time, get back to those original factory settings. Tbd, sister, Tbd. As many of you have tested and know – I’m here for you 24/7, as always at atoosa@atoosa.com.
xo, atoosa
The soundtrack of my 🤍🖤❤️ :