My Name Is Mahtob: The Story That Began the Global Phenomenon Not Without My Daughter Continues

by Mahtob Mahmoody

  The scene played out before me in slow motion. The boy whose table matched mine was badly outnumbered, and I watched silently as the three ruffians beat him up. They knocked him out of his chair, punched him, kicked him, and cursed him. I looked around the room at all the other students, my eyes pleading with them to do something to protect this boy who wasn’t able to protect himself. No one moved. In my head I was screaming for someone, anyone, to make it all stop. How could it be that not one person would take action? How could it be that I, of all people, could be one of them?

  Just as quickly as they’d come, the attackers fled, leaving the boy alone and gasping for air on the floor, writhing in agony. My fear had been replaced by bitter anguish. I wanted to cry, but I didn’t. I wanted to go to him, to help him up, to comfort him, and yet I remained frozen.

  The whole room was filled with an oppressive silence. All the sounds of a few minutes earlier—the hissing of the espresso machine, the din of students conversing, the scraping of chairs on the floor, the thud of books landing on tables, the squeak of tennis shoes on linoleum—had come to a halt with the sound of fists pounding into a body.

  Shame is hard to hide. It reveals itself in our expressions, in our body language. Shame averts the eyes, bends the head toward the ground, and stoops the shoulders. It was a feeling I knew well.

  It was with shame that the boy collected his belongings, his sounds echoing in the still room. He shuffled his papers, tapping them on the table to straighten their edges. He stacked his books one atop the other and stuffed them into his backpack and zipped it. The swoosh of his bag brushing across his shoulder was followed by his barely audible groan as its weight landed on his back.

  It was with shame that I listened to his uneven gait as he limped toward the main door. I still couldn’t move. The sound of fist pounding flesh had transported me back to Iran.

  I don’t know what set my father off that time. He was screaming as his fists pounded into Mom, calling her a saag, a dog, a most detested and filthy creature in the Persian culture. “I’ll kill you,” he seethed. “Do you understand me? I’ll kill you, and you’ll never see Mahtob again.”

  Her arms were up, shielding her face in an unsuccessful attempt to deflect his blows. I ran to her and wedged my body between theirs, begging my dad to stop hitting her as I tried to push him away. He brushed me aside.

  Undaunted I jumped back into the fray. This time he picked me up and threw me across the room. I crashed into the wall and slid to the floor.

  Still undeterred, I started screaming, “I have to go to the bathroom! I have to go to the bathroom!” That had worked in the past. He knew I was afraid of the bathroom. I never went into a bathroom alone. Mom always went with me. The bathroom was our safe place, the place where we whispered our prayers. But he didn’t know that. It was our secret.

  That night, though, not even the bathroom would save us. Out of the corner of his eye he caught me sticking my fingers down my throat to make myself vomit, just as Mom and I had rehearsed. It was our absolute last resort, to be used only in the direst emergency. He turned to come after me, and Mom yelled for me to run for help.

  I didn’t want to leave her, but she was begging me. “Mahtob, run! Go get help. Hide. Don’t let him find you. I’ll be okay. Run!”

  I ran down the stairs to where Reza and Essie lived. Desperately I banged on their door. “Help! Please, help,” I shouted, but I’m not sure the words actually escaped my mouth. There was no answer.

  I could hear my dad coming for me. Mom was begging, “No, please, Moody. Don’t do this.” He slammed the door, and her protests were silenced. “You’ll never see Mahtob again,” he growled again.

  I continued to pound on Reza and Essie’s door. Still no answer. My heart raced. I heard my dad slide the key into the lock, and the bolt slid into place. Mom was trapped inside our apartment. Was she okay? Hide, I thought, I’ve got to hide.

  The footsteps grew louder with every step as he pounded down the stairs. They echoed in the stairwell. I ran around the corner. There was a baby crib stored in the hallway. I crawled into the darkness beneath the crib and prayed he wouldn’t find me. He did, of course, because I was five and five-year-olds hide in predictable places.

  The next two weeks were a blur. He took me away from Mom and told me I’d never see her again. My only hope was that God would keep her safe in my absence. Every night I gazed out at the moon and knew that no matter where we were, Mom and I were seeing the same moon and thinking of each other. She had promised me that.

  Mom had prepared me for separation. She had coached me and had given me songs to sing. They were our secret code. It was her way of giving me her words of comfort for the times she couldn’t be there to soothe me in person.

  They say the body attacks at its weakest point. If that’s true, my weakest point in those days was my stomach. I had a bad case of diarrhea during those two weeks. Thankfully the apartment he had taken me to had a toilet instead of the standard hole in the floor. Day after day I sat on the toilet for what felt like an eternity while he paced back and forth, interrogating me.

  “Mahtob, tell me what you and your mom are up to,” he demanded. “Who do you talk to? Where did you go when you were late for school?”

  “We’re not up to anything. We don’t talk to anyone. We got lost.”

  “You didn’t get lost. You know the way to school.”

  “Yes, we did. We got lost.” It’s what Mom had coached me to say if he asked.

  “You’re lying to me.”

  Sometimes his nephew would sit on the floor between us and urge him to calm down. It was an exercise in futility—for the nephew and for my father. “What is your mom up to? Where do you go? Who do you see?”

  The questions were incessant, but I was stubborn. Sometimes I didn’t answer at all. I stared at the floor and sang in my head, God is so goooood. God is so goooood . . . Sometimes I sang, The sun’ll come out [inhale] tomorrow . . .

  “Answer me,” he’d bellow, “where do you go?”

  Silence. Ohhh, thuhhh sun’ll come out [inhale] tomorrow . . . Oh, how I hated him.

  Had I known then that my dad would take me back to my mom in two weeks, the separation would have been much more bearable. I really believed him when he said I’d never see her again.

  There were children who lived in my prison. I don’t remember them, but there must have been children because there was a room filled with their toys. One day, sitting on the floor, I spotted a familiar hint of yellow poking from beneath a pile. Brushing the other toys aside, I unearthed a miraculous reminder of home—my real home, the one back in Michigan. It was a little doll with a cloth body filled with foam beads. It had yellow clothes sewn on and a yellow hat with white lace trim stitched to its head. Its smiling face was plastic with a few small curls sticking out where the hat and the face met. This doll’s bangs were matted and tangled just like mine.

  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Ah, home. I could almost imagine that it smelled like home. That doll was a gift from God. I carried it everywhere with me, taking secret comfort in its familiarity.

  Worse than my dad’s rages and incessant questions during those two weeks were the air raids. During the bombings I was inconsolable. I kept thinking of Mom alone in the apartment, locked in so she couldn’t take shelter in the hallway with the others who lived in the building. What if the bombs got her and I wasn’t there? I knew she must have been worried about me, too, and the thought of causing her distress was as painful for me as my concern for her safety.

  Ameh Bozorg put her foot down at last. “Can’t you see?” she scolded my father. “The child doesn’t know anything. Take her back to her mother.”

  Despite his brutality, he loved me. He couldn’t stand to see me so distraught, and neither could his family. During an air raid he finally relented and took me back to Mom.

  Over the years I had repeatedly been forced to come to terms with my past. But the experience in the library—
and more specifically, my reaction to it—left me feeling confused.

  In my psych classes I had learned that people are creatures of habit. We develop internal scripts for dealing with emotions and experiences and, generally speaking, we follow them. In other words, we tend to respond to situations in a manner similar to the way we responded to them in the past.

  Why then, hadn’t I intervened when the boy was being beaten? When had my script been rewritten? Was I losing my resiliency? Was I being broken, or was my memory faulty? Had I just convinced myself that I had been a scrappy little kid who wasn’t afraid to intervene?

  After wrestling with these questions for a few days, I called Mom and told her what happened. I asked how I used to react when my dad beat her. In her wisdom, she answered my question with a question of her own. “Well, what do you remember?”

  “I was fearless,” I said. “I didn’t just stand on the sidelines and wait for it to be over. I jumped in front of him. I pushed him. I yelled at him, I created diversions and begged others to help.”

  “Mahtob, you’ve always had a good memory,” she reassured me. “Remember when we went to Texas to visit the Bartons right after we came home from Iran? We walked into a restaurant, and right away you told me all about being there three years earlier, when you were just four. You didn’t just show me the table where we’d eaten; you actually pointed to each chair and said, ‘This is where I sat, and this is where you sat, and this is where Daddy sat.’ You even told me what each of us had ordered. You have an incredible memory.”

  Then it was true. It wasn’t my memory that was failing; it was my resiliency. And that was much more terrifying.

  CHAPTER 27

  When my dad interfered with my life, he was never considerate enough to sound the all clear when his intrusion subsided. So I was left hanging in an ever-tenuous state of alarm. Lupus, being an opportunistic fiend, seized the occasion to reassert its destructive grip on my body.

  Dr. Beals, well acquainted with the body’s tenacious striving to preserve itself as long as humanly possible, knew to explore six months into the past when identifying a flare’s trigger—a fact I was acutely aware of as my dad’s reappearance in my life reached its six-month. To my relief, the sixth month came and went without medical incident, as did months seven, eight, nine, and ten. It was around month twelve that I finally had to face the fact that my lupus was once again out of control.

  Knowing the seriousness of my health complications, I turned to my ever-faithful rheumatologist for her medical expertise.

  “Tell me, what do you hear from your dad these days?” she asked as she sat down on her little stool with wheels. I sat in the teal wingback chair. Dr. Beals preferred to let her patients spend the vast majority of their time talking with her from the comfort of the cozy chairs in the exam rooms as opposed to sitting precariously on the edge of a cold exam table.

  “It’s basically the same,” I told her. “He still sends e-mails, and I still don’t respond. He hasn’t given up on filming a reunion. Now he’s changed up his strategy. Instead of insisting that he’s my father and he won’t allow me to be anything but Muslim, he’s turned to saying he’s dying. I think he’s just hoping to create a sense of urgency. His documentary is still under production. Since I saw you last, I found out that they’ve arranged for an MSU student to work as their intern on the project. He’s following me.”

  “That’s a lot to deal with. How are you doing with all of it?” she asked, giving me her full attention. My chart lay unopened on her lap beneath her folded hands.

  “I’m fine. I’ve got lots of practice at dealing with the chaos. I’m doing just fine.” I gave my best attempt at making my smile reach my eyes, but I was just too exhausted.

  “How are you really doing?” She knew me well. There was no putting on a brave face with her.

  My eyes welled, and my chin quivered. “I hate it.” The words caught in my throat. “I hate everything about it, and I hate him.”

  She reached forward and took my hands in hers. Looking me straight in the eyes, she said simply, “That’s understandable.”

  “I don’t want to hate him,” I sobbed. “I don’t want to live with that bitterness. I know it’s not healthy—for my body or my soul. I forgave him years ago for what he did to us in Iran, but he just wouldn’t let it be. He had to start causing problems again. I just want him to leave us alone. I’m so tired of being afraid all the time.”

  “Have you tried praying for him?” Dr. Beals asked softly.

  “What?”

  “Have you tried praying for him?” She sat quietly, giving me time to ponder her question.

  I shook my head and took the tissue she offered. I couldn’t breathe.

  “Maybe it’s worth a shot. I’ve been doing this for a lot of years, and one thing I’ve learned is that the body is reached through the spirit. First you have to heal the soul. Then you can work on the body.”

  Dr. Beals had a wisdom about her that I found to be uplifting. When I was in despair, she gave me hope. I knew she was right. If I couldn’t find a way to once again make peace with the idea of my father, my health would continue to decline.

  “Don’t be too discouraged about this step backward in your health. This is a part of the disease,” Dr. Beals reassured me. “You’ve done well to stay as stable as you have for as long as you have given all the stress you’ve been under. We’ve been down this road before, and we’ll get through it together, just like we always have.”

  “I know. I just don’t want to go back on meds. I can’t stand the thought of being on meds the rest of my life.”

  “Well, let’s not think about it in those terms then. We’ll start out aggressively and see if we can stop this flare in its tracks. Then we’ll get you off the meds as soon as your body lets us.”

  “What do you think?” I asked, feeling defeated. “Six months? A year?”

  “You know I can’t make any guarantees, but we will do everything we can to get you off everything except Plaquenil as quickly as possible. You already know I think it would be good for you to stay on that one as a maintenance measure. We’ll keep a close eye on your labs and start decreasing dosages once you’re stable. The only way this works, though, is if you take your medication as prescribed. Remember our deal?”

  “I remember. You are going to do everything in your power to help me get better. But you can only help me if I am completely honest with you and if I follow our treatment plan to the letter.”

  “Precisely.”

  We had first established our agreement when I was just thirteen. Those were the terms on which Dr. Beals had accepted me as a patient. If I couldn’t hold up my end of the bargain, then I would have to find a different doctor, because she couldn’t provide effective treatment for me without my participation.

  Dr. Beals had trained me well. We were a team and, even as a teenager, I’d been the one who called the shots. She’d taught me to take responsibility for the decisions I made and their impact on my health. Believing in education, Dr. Beals had instilled in me a hunger to understand the mechanisms by which my body operated so that we could better collaborate in treatment planning. She was merely a resource for me, a source of knowledge and guidance. My job, as the one living every day under the weight of my illness, was to make use of every tool at my disposal to improve the quality of my life.

  I wasn’t the only one who got such personalized treatment from Dr. Beals. She spent as much time with each patient as they needed. This attention to the human side of patient care was, in great part, what made Dr. Beals such an outstanding physician. Often, when I checked in for an appointment, the receptionist would hand me a packet of medical journal articles or newspaper clippings, saying Dr. Beals had asked that I read them while I waited so we could discuss the latest findings during my appointment. It wasn’t unusual for me to leave her office with a stack of books and a prescription sheet with other recommended reading.

  From the outset Dr. Beals had t
reated me as an equal, valuing the insight I brought to our process. “You’re the only expert on your health,” she had told me when I was scarcely more than a child. “Everyone’s body is different and responds differently to different treatments. You are the only expert there is on your specific case. You’re our best source of information.”

  I hadn’t always liked her recommendations, but I had never doubted her concern for my well-being. It wasn’t her fault that the standard treatment for lupus was medication. It also wasn’t her fault that I had such a bad attitude about taking pills.

  After today’s visit, she sent me on my way with a hug, a lab slip, and a stack of prescriptions. My emotions were mixed. I felt recharged, ready to take on the battle for my health and yet frustrated to be standing once again at that all-too-familiar crossroad. Getting off medication was no small achievement in my world. Staying off medication was the ultimate victory, and having to start the meds again felt like a stinging defeat.

  Mom was always eager to hear where things stood after an appointment. I tried to sound positive as I ran through the list of prescriptions. She knew the meds as well as I did. Telling her the drug name and dosage was enough to tell her the severity of the flare. These blows were perhaps more devastating for her than for me.

  I knew the routine. The top of my dresser was once again lined with the ugly orange bottles with white lids, and my days were once again bookended with brutal medication regimens. Some pills were designed to counteract lupus symptoms, and some were designed to counteract side effects caused by the other pills.

  As in some of my previous flares, the medication did stop the progression of the disease and eased some of my symptoms, but I still didn’t feel well. Debilitating fatigue plagued me and made it a monumental task to maintain my school and work schedule. My headaches persisted. My hair continued to fall out, and my joints continued to ache. My labs continued to confirm that lupus was causing my body to attack itself. And the emotional toll of the disease was perhaps the most difficult aspect for me. It was brutal to be trapped in a body that made simple daily functioning so arduous.