Embroideries What My Mother Never Told Me

My mother never talked to me about sex. Neither did her mother talk to her. And her mother’s mother probably died without ever saying that word out loud once in her entire life.

Not because they were ignorant. Not because they didn’t know. But because there are things one generation passes to the next without saying them, wrapped in silence, and silence is also a way of teaching. It teaches you that certain questions don’t get asked. That there are parts of yourself that don’t get named. That however you arrive at your own life, you arrive alone.

That’s what Embroideries opens up. Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel. It’s the afternoon. The men are asleep. The women stay behind with their tea and start talking. They’re Iranian, different generations, and what they say in that room is what they never said anywhere else. The arranged marriage that came without love and found something close to it over time. The body they discovered alone, without anyone telling them they had the right to know it. Virginity handed over as proof of something nobody asked them if they wanted to prove.

What hurts reading this book isn’t that it’s Iranian. What hurts is recognizing it.

Recognizing your mother in that woman who learned to love what she was given because nobody showed her other options existed. Recognizing your grandmother in the one who laughs while telling something that without the laughter would be unbearable. Recognizing that pattern that repeats across generations where women take care of each other in secret, pass information in low voices, build an invisible survival network that the men never see because they’re never invited into that room.

The French title is Broderies. It means embroidery, but also gossip, and also the surgical reconstruction of the hymen to simulate what’s no longer there. All three at once. Satrapi chose it because she knew that in a single word you could fit the whole history of what women have had to sew, mend and pretend in order to keep standing.

Depending on where you were born, that room exists in different forms. But it exists. And what gets said inside depends on what the women before you were brave enough, or not brave enough, to say.

My mother never talked to me about sex. But she talked to me about other things, in her own way, through her silences, through what she chose to tell me and what she chose to keep. And I do the same. And sometimes I don’t know if I’m breaking the chain or just changing the knot.