2026-04-15
35 分钟This is The Guardian.
The Guardian Archive Long Read.
Hi, my name is Dina Nayeri and I'm the author of Foreign Mothers, Foreign Tongues.
In Another Universe, She Could Have Been My Friend, which was published in The Guardian Long Read 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 when I became a mother.
I wrote the piece because, you know, obviously there were 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 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.