Iran Awakening by Shirin Ebadi

Author:Shirin Ebadi
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781407028361
Publisher: Ebury Publishing
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

My two daughters were growing old enough that they came home from school each day with a barrage of questions. Thud. They would toss their backpacks in the hallway. Thud thud. They would run down the hall, fingers sticky from a snack on the way home. Navigating the Islamic Republic as a woman was getting more tricky, and so was navigating Islamic Republic motherhood. Maman, is it really wrong

My daughters, Negar and Nargess.

for me to go in front of my male cousins without a veil? Maman, is America truly the source of all that is toxic in the world? Maman, was Mossadegh really a bad man? It was a delicate balance, trying to teach my daughters progressive values and the emptiness behind the revolutionary dogma they were fed in school, while ensuring that they learned and superficially obeyed all that dogma anyway, so they could pass through the education system. "A lot of this is simply wrong," I would usually say, "but you need to study it anyway, so you can pass your exams and go to college."

My husband, Javad, as usual, left these delicate lessons to me. Just as he left the cooking, the shopping, the cleaning, the balancing of the checkbook, and the shuttling of the girls to and from their classes to me. With the caseload I was taking on, balancing the attention the girls needed at home and my work was getting harder. And now the girls didn't need just bedtime stories anymore. They needed our guidance in dealing with adolescence in Tehran, with all its lures and chaos. "Just tell me if you need any help," Javad would say. And that struck me as most unfair of all, because I certainly never waited for him to ask, "Shirin jan, can you please cook dinner tonight?" I cooked dinner every single night because it was obvious to me that it was my responsibility. This was the running theme of our arguments. He wanted me to tell him what to do, and I thought he should figure it out without being told.

Between my practice in the morning and working on articles in the evening, I had started my next book, a treatise on the rights of refugees. Before I started my legal practice, the book writing kept my mind engaged, but now, combined with representing clients, it resulted in an often overwhelming workload. I managed to keep the household running smoothly only by planning well in advance. There was really no such institution as takeout, and the expectations of an Iranian wife include that she will cook. Leaving a sink full of dirty dishes or a hamper full of laundry is simply not an option. If I needed to travel or take a short trip for work, I arranged all the family's meals in advance. They would know to look on the top shelf of the refrigerator for that evening's cutlet, and then in the freezer for the meals labeled for the following days of the week. I even made just the right amount of fresh salad dressing and put that in the refrigerator too.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.