The Migratory Pattern of Serious Girls

In the summer of 1999, we moved from a Chicago suburb to an Atlanta one. I walked around the freshly purchased house and wondered if we got rich overnight. The house was brand new, no forgotten nails in the walls or outlines of frames. I’d never seen myself in a pretty house like that. I usually don’t see myself in the future in anything better than what I have; maybe I’ll think I’ll jinx it, or worse, maybe my imagination is for everyone else but me. Either way the future is blocked, locked up with the photograph of what I’ll look like if I turn eighty.

My dad picked the house without us. We all saw it when we moved there. Come to think of it, my dad picked my mom without seeing her in person. Just hearsay and some letters. I suppose on some level my parents have always accepted the possibility of things and worked with them. They got married over the telephone and had a fake ceremony. I saw the picture once of my mom in lace holding the phone with her pretty hands, cradling the spiral coil softly. That was their wedding photo, and it was never on display in the house, that yellowed symbol of a decision they made. It’s been forty years and that wedding photo of a slender bride without the groom, who I imagine was bussing tables, preparing for a wife, and making what would be the first of many sentimental sacrifices, is still so far away and unseen. 

During a break at work, I ate salad and texted my mom.

“Random question. Do you have your wedding photo?”

“Wedding photo?” My mom texts back. “I should look for it.”

“Yes, wedding photo. You never hung that picture, right?”

“Never.”

“That’s what I thought. Do you know why you didn’t?”

“Don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t have meaning in my opinion. And my wedding day your dad wasn’t there, remember?”

“Yes. I think you told me once it felt silly, loos, to you.  Am I remembering right?” 

She was busy at work and didn’t text me back. I forget sometimes that writers ask disarming questions. I texted later that I don’t like to put up photos that make me uncomfortable either. She didn’t message me back, but she is not one to reassess the past the way I do. Cancers are compassionate and embarrass easily; I don’t know if she’d extend that compassion to herself when she thinks about her past.

Mom met Dad after she flew over the Atlantic and dropped into her new life with a grey suitcase. Geography changed her life. I wonder if those migratory birds that fly close to the water were coasting alongside her plane the day she landed in Chicago. Some species can go for days over water and never stop. The vast, uncluttered ocean surface helps create a ground effect, a phenomenon of airflow that allows for migratory birds to fly safely and efficiently so long as the bird flies no higher from the surface than its wingspan. This is why some birds skim. Other birds might soar above the clouds like a whooper swan, white and open, 8,000 feet over the vast ocean. I’m sure she wouldn’t have thought of birds flying purposefully alongside her; she must have looked with swollen eyes out of the airplane window, wondering what would come of her life now that there was a crack between that self and this one. 

Maybe I inherited what she never says, that aggravated sense that any choice a woman makes is a compromise. But is that every woman, or just the serious ones? Maybe I want a trust fund of golden coins, all embossed with a woman’s silhouette, a currency for going back in time and absolving the debt of the life we chose not to live when we decided to try this one. But when time broke last year, I didn’t have gold coins. I leaned against the sofa, bracketed and safe, and I gathered that my short years of unmarried adult life were more than what I give them credit for. 

See, everything as a Persian daughter is gradual. My dad bought me a used car even before I had my license, but I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere with it. I could bleach my upper lip hair but not shave my legs. I could go to the mall with my friends, but only for one hour and don’t change the plans while you’re there. I could go to a dance but only with girls. I could live in a dorm, but I have to come home every weekend. I could go to a concert, but my dad would come with me. I can have the experience, but within reason. This is how I learned love, a gradual giving into what a child wants because you don’t want them to want, not when you love them as much as you do.

I was nineteen when I met a man—just when I figured out people here thought I was exotic—and he became my husband three years later. How cliché for someone whose nearsighted future was supposed to be drunk and free in a dorm room in Urbana Champaign. I was to be fiercely independent and have scars to prove it; I’d go rogue and fly to South America without a flock. Back then I saw the other life because no imagination soars greater than that of a college student. College presents a buffet of enticements, heaps of chances juxtaposed alongside warnings not to overfill one’s plate lest you lose the ability to taste anything at all.  But I was a Georgia resident now and going back to school in Chicago would be unaffordable, impractical.

The man I met in college is a decade older than me. We talked all night, and then we went on a few dates, and then I told my mom. We decided to tell Dad, but I didn’t know what that meant. I was just glad to have been honest and to have his blessing. In the end, it meant that I was a serious girl. It meant I didn’t date for fun and that I was to be treated with the same courtesy and honor with which I was raised. It worked; he took me seriously, waited for me to finish school, and we got married. I was raised a serious girl; where else will all that family love and unintentional domestic grooming have gone? To an unsafe city for a selfish career that would witness my promiscuity and independence? Those are not the words they would have used; they are intuitive parents with liberal kindness and conservative decisions. But how else is a good family supposed to let their daughter go? So, after all, I didn’t go much of anywhere.

Up until recently, I felt loos, silly, thinking back on those first years in college while I was a serious girl in a serious relationship. I’ve felt embarrassed at how my young life got away from me so fast, the way my life would change for eternity and in any stories that will ever be told of me. I’ve felt guilty that my rehearsed youngness was mixed up with the days of being in a new relationship on top of so many other new things, and that it turned into a marriage. How predictable. The outcome is not what itches, it’s something else. In fact, the outcome seems the easiest and most traditional of them all, a sweet holiday photo taken on my front porch. What has prevented me from revisiting these formative middle years is the greedy gnawing that I only did what was within half my wingspan, that safe inertia, a straight line at the same speed moving me forward in a serious way. 

There is a certain reel of pictures that plays when I think of my undergraduate life; they run together, frame after frame, as though they were all one cylinder of thought. Though recently when talking to a friend and reminiscing about the times we shared dinner plates at crowded restaurants, a time when accidental proximity to another person in chattering groups and clinking glasses signaled a good time rather than impending doom and rapid tests, I remembered Taverna Plaka, a family-style Greek restaurant that turned into a nightclub at 10 pm.  In a red album on my old bookcase, I have pictures of us there, each one with the date and year italicized in grey on the back. 

We’d go there on our own, with friends, and then eventually with generations of family. It was a place for a serious girl to feel sexy even in the company of her future relatives. I’d stand in line to ask the DJ to play an Arabic song where we could click our hips alongside the belly dancer. I could sense men staring at my back, shining under the spaghetti straps of my new BCBG leopard print top. When the song came on, we gathered with anyone at the table, strangers included, and danced, yelling song lyrics like a sports fan singing drunkenly after half time. I felt sexy and young. If you were there, someone would hand you a soft stack of white napkins and tell you to throw them, and then you would to your own surprise, and they would fall down. You’d see them scatter near the fake gold coins on the ground that fell off a belly dancer’s skirt; they always do. Those coins with faded emblems that shine like holiday candy. Sometimes the regular dancer would put a jingling scarf around your waist, and you’d discover that people all around you clapped for you no matter how you did. I used to remember this and feel unsatisfied; I used to remember it as a time that looked like it was really fun. There is a photo of the man and me, he’s looking up in praise and my arms are up by my head as I smile on him, both of us caught by surprise in this relic from our past. I became accustomed to avoiding those photos because I sensed they felt like a me that never really existed though I chose to be there.

But back in the quiet room when Dad said we should meet the man, my mom had said no. Dad insisted he come over for a proper meeting. She had said, “No, it’s not necessary. It is too early to call it anything.” Her instinct is as clear as the quiet night in my bedroom when we talked about it. I just didn’t want him to say no, forcing me to continue dating in secret. I didn’t know what the meeting could mean except that I’d get his blessing to continue. Years ago in her young life, Mom had said, “No, I don’t want to get married and move.” She had whispered no all her life so that the only thing she could control was the possibility in front of her, the safety and well-being of her kids. That became her greatest gift.  But what if my mother’s might was as strong as my father’s? What if they saw things the same way? What if Georgia didn’t happen? What if all that was supposed to be back in Chicago happened instead, and I became that person and not this one. That’s when I get stuck and hunch in discomfort at how wrong it feels to say it that way. There is no guarantee in that life. There is no blame, just observation of how things unfolded. Just the acceptance of what is and the longing for what isn’t.  

The other day, Mom came by the house to pick up the kids. It was cold and rainy. As she was getting into her seat, I blurted it out again from across the driveway. 

“Why didn’t you put up the picture?”

“What do you need the photo for?” She closed the door and looked at me, not at all ready to have that conversation.

“I don’t need it for anything.” I started to consider that maybe I do want the picture. “What I want to know is why didn’t you ever put it up?”

She shook her head slightly. “I never loved it. I felt I was just doing it for everyone else.”

When she left, I closed my eyes and imagined being in that photo next to her, her future child and carrier of her story. I want to tell her it’s okay to feel embarrassed when you see this photo later. You’re shy from your own expectations; you’re flying low and steady for the flock. I know you didn’t want this life for yourself, that you didn’t imagine anything else hard enough to make it happen. But what a cool story you’re making, Mom. I’m not here yet, but I’ll tell you thirty-eight years later, okay? I will hang up your photo on my wall. And I’ll hang my own, too. 

My cousin and I were talking about our family. I said I’d rather have been born in their generation; they seem to have defied convention. The line of serious girls seems outdated now. “You didn’t do stupid shit when you were younger like we did; you just grew up faster than us,” she said.  But I’m a Capricorn like my dad. We accept what is and then long for what isn’t. I didn’t think I had many choices even if it seemed that way. My body matured, and I knew how to act with it. That’s all.

The other day I startled myself. I remembered those Plaka days and missed them. The photo of the man and me surrounded by eager, clapping hands, is from a time that would have beguiled any young woman to love her most handsome stranger. Have you ever felt that calm after you’ve forgiven someone? I didn’t go where I imagined, but being serious isn’t easy, and I think I want to be less serious about how I look back on it. Plaka nights from twenty years ago are irretrievable. This break in time, this ocean gave me a space to reconsider. Maybe everyone in the room with the mural of the fake Greek olive trees knew on some level what was happening there was special—all that joy, the possibility of being admired, young and dancing—that no, actually, that type of energy isn’t constant. Maybe when my parents clapped while the man and I danced, and while his family clapped for us, too, we were the ones who brought that transient joy. There is a rarity to finding special in the ordinary. No one thought about the quiet parking lot or the drive home, the swollen feet and the blurred eye liner. It took time migration, from one sense to another, to say, hey, that was kind of rare. And rare isn’t predictable.

While I folded laundry, my mom texted me photos and then called me right away.

“I looked for the photos for you. Did you see the one with your uncle?”

“I see all of them except the one I wanted, but these are really nice.” I put my daughter’s clothes in one pile.

“Do you see those two kids sitting next to me? They are in their forties now. Can you believe it? And look at that one with your dad’s sisters. Look how young we were!” She tells me to scroll down and see the rest.

“Oh, I really love these.” I search for more answers. She seems less bothered by the photos now that she’s looking at them with me. “Can you tell me more about why you didn’t do much with them?” I stopped folding and looked out the window.

“I didn’t want a wedding. The political situation was bad. Some people believed everyone should have equal things. I wanted to help the poor. It felt foolish to spend money on a wedding and the parties. Your dad wasn’t even there. My parents were fighting over the guests and who should come. So many arguments.” She paused and then laughed a little. “I didn’t want to put makeup on. I felt silly about all the fuss.”

“I can understand that. Can I have some of those wedding photos? I’d like to put them up in my room.”

“I guess when I think about it, sure, why not.”

“Good.” I pick up my son’s laundry bin. “I may add some from that red album, too.”

I had assumed she only felt loos because the photo represented a version of her that she felt wasn’t her own. But it wasn’t just that. It was about so many things that were out of her control. She was raised serious, too. When she saw the photo, she saw the growing pains associated with it. She remembered the heightened friction. Yet in the same breath, she asked me questions. “Do you see that iron area by the window? That’s where your grandma’s friends used to come by and gossip.” And then she said, “Those flowers by my wedding table—they had those special ordered.” She laughed and said, “Look at that balcony. Your aunt and I used to get a kick out of the boys that would come out to see us from there.”

Eventually, her life will represent a series of migrations. Have you ever seen birds flying with ground effect? They see everything up close; they trail each other in marvelous arches. Sometimes you’ll spot one leading all the others in one glorious line, or you’ll see one going rogue, pulling up and out of the continuum, and then gliding back down. Perhaps the core of my imagination is that I’ve always wanted to be both birds, and I have no idea what that will look like.

You may find Samira Shakib-Bregeth's work on Parhelion, Hungry Chimera, Fig & Quince, and Sweatpants & Coffee. Samira writes a blog that focuses on the lens of motherhood. The novel she is working on was nominated in 2021 for UCLA's Allegra Johnson writing prize. She is inspired often and has a soft heart for creatives and dreamers.