I was born as an ode to this country—skin and sinew spun from the American Dream, from my mother’s stretch marks and growing pains. She chose my name because it means “blossom” in her language—because she wanted me to grow and climb and soak in the sun of opportunity, to bask in the privilege she sowed for me with calloused hands. 

I am the first child, the first American-born link in a chain of factory workers and women who learned to cook and cover themselves before they learned to trace the letters of their names. With my birth, my mother was tied to this country, and as I glide comfortably through life, she cannot help but remember the potholes and crossroads she traversed to get here. 

I learned recently that my mother came into this world by accident. She told me once, casually, that my grandmother had prayed for a miscarriage. Yet, nine months later, my mother tumbled out of the womb, sturdy and loud. Her brothers were born ten years before her, their youth shrinking as she hurdled into a home with no space for her—barreling into life with aspirations greater than her zip code. 

She spent her childhood in Paşabahçe, a small collection of roads and apartments. A community of laborers and fishermen, of salt-stained hills that kissed the fog and plunged into the Bosporus. My mother climbed those hills every day, following my grandmother down the cobblestone, to the docks where ferries launched into the water, humming under the sky’s morning breath. 

She arrived at school before the sun rose from beneath the sea, waiting in the halls until the janitor came to switch the lights on. She’d perch on the floor, tracing her fingers along the lines, inventing personalities for the numbers posted on the bulletin board. Eleven was her favorite because it looked like a pair of legs, a body ready to spring into motion. 

She created worlds in the empty building—fictional realms where the only residents were her and digits and decimals. She was alone, but not lonely. Something about school always comforted her. Her appetite for learning gnawed at her subconscious, sparking dreams of crowded bookshelves and fresh notebook paper. She worshipped her third-grade teacher—a kind woman, her first female instructor. She took my mother’s class to a play once, my mother’s eyes growing full and heavy as she left her neighborhood for the first time, digesting the city around her, memorizing buildings and squares and street names so she could reconstruct their borders in her sleep that night. 

My mother was ten when a coup erupted in the city: 1980, the year the soldiers came. Her brothers were rounded up in raids, tossed against walls, thrown against the shoulders of other men in the backs of trucks. It became a routine, something she laughs about now, an anecdote disguised and diluted by normalcy. She watched the scene from her window, shielded by the invisibility of girlhood. Her brothers would be released eventually, for they had never done anything wrong. But until they were, she sat quietly beside her mother as she wept—peeling potatoes in silence, skin stinging in the cold water, fingers pruned and wrinkled. 

As she grew older, the house demanded more of her time, and she began sinking into the mold of the women who came before her. My mother has a special love for her mother, my grandmother, but she never wanted to repeat the tragedies of her life, to let her aspirations wither and die before she could grasp a high school diploma. But she did not have the luxury to refuse, so she learned how to decipher electricity bills, parsing government documents under the clouds of her father’s cigarette smoke. 

At the market, she followed her mother’s hips through tight aisles, memorizing prices. She learned to haggle until negotiation became a second language. Her hands grew familiar with soft produce, overripe fruit, the weight of lentils measured into plastic bags. The world outside narrowed, pushed to the edges by errands and obligation. Still, she did not complain. She swept the floors and peeled the skin off figs and pinched her younger cousins’ cheeks when they came to visit. 

On weekends, she was the one sent for water. She walked across the hills, through the alleys and side streets to the fountain, dragging two buckets that clashed against the bone in her ankles. The sun stained her skin as she climbed back home, the water pulling her limbs to the ground as she struggled to lift the metal handles. Her shoulder blades pinched tighter, her flesh growing red and raw, her legs swelling with the ache of repetition. The buckets bit into her hands as the water sloshed and spat against her wrists, punishing any misstep. She climbed slowly up the final stretch, the road ahead curling upward like a cat’s tail. The horizon eluded her each time she neared it, rising just as she thought it might settle. In these moments, she pressed her eyes shut, bracing under the weight of it all, waiting until she reached the top—assuring herself the climb was almost over, that she’d make it soon enough. 

The world seemed to steady for a moment when my mother received a scholarship for college. She was the first in her family to make it past high school, though her oldest brother had tried. He wanted to be an engineer, to shape the world with his mind, but his family could not bear the costs of his dreams. And so he was sent to the assembly line, to the glass-blowing factory beside his father—beside his younger brother, who had given up long before him. 

My mother commuted to her university, a humble group of concrete buildings across the city. She took the ferry each morning, waking, just as she had in elementary school, before the sun had risen over the strait. She sat on the deck, watching Paşabahçe drift past, wondering if it would ever feel bigger than it did from her seat. When she graduated, she took a job in marketing research—her first office, a place where people addressed her formally and she responded with practiced poise. But her days still collapsed into familiar routines. 

She left work as the call to prayer cracked the soundscape open, returning to the same room she’d lived in as a girl, passing the same laundry line that sang with the wind outside, the same stoop where neighbors traded gossip like prayers. She knew every crack in the sidewalk. Every rusted gate. The repetition stirred unrest between her ribs, an uneasiness jostling against her chest. She found herself lurching forward in her sleep, reaching her palms towards a shapeless future, groping for something she could not name. 

When she told her parents that she wanted to leave—to go back to school, to move to America— they were silent at first. They said that they understood, that they should have known she would outgrow Paşabahçe. They had seen her ambitions fester like a wound untended; they had seen her grow up, after all, watched as she craved more than their neighborhood could offer. She told herself she’d come back. Maybe after two years. Maybe three. But even then, a part of her knew that leaving was not something you did once. 

Later, she would hear from her cousins that they saw her father cry for the first time when she left. She never witnessed his tears, never saw the quiet she left behind swell into grief on his face. But she cried for him when he died years later, sobbing with the same emptiness, knowing that if she had been born a little humbler—if she had come into this world willing to swallow her ambition—she might have been home in time to hold his hand. 

New York was my mother’s first American home, a city of foreign phrases tangled together, swear words and unfamiliar English rising like smoke in the air. She moved into her friend’s living room and went to school in the city, working at a clothing store where teenage girls asked for sizes too fast, spat questions she didn’t understand, made faces when her tongue tripped over a language whose intricacies they had inherited at birth. She folded their cardigans and counted coins during her breaks, memorizing the shape of sentences without grasping their meaning. 

Her English had improved when she met my father, enough to build a relationship that would one day become a marriage, enough for her to discuss with him whether they should move to California before the birth of their first child—if it would break her family to move another coast further, to evade them by shifting as far west as possible. 

She never abandoned Turkey, though the guilt clings to her soul as if she did, following her as she shifted continents and states, hiding in the rafters of our house. Paşabahçe haunts our home, photos of my cousins and grandparents frozen in time behind picture frames. She does not resent the life she chose, the existence she created for her children—her decision to extract us from the thinning alleyways of Istanbul, to raise us in the jaundiced glow of streetlights, the strip malled horizons and concrete expanses.

My mother exists in a limbo, a space between home and country, between the life she built with battered hands and the people she left behind. We will never understand her pain, my brother and I. We can only decipher the hurt in her eyes when we forget the intonations of Turkish consonants and vowels, when our faces glaze with confusion over the names of aunts and cousins she grew up with, faceless characters that slip through the gaps in our minds. 

Sometimes I think she longs for a dual existence, to split her soul cleanly down the middle, so she wouldn’t have to banish her upbringing to the hazy corridors of memory. But she cannot tear herself apart, and she knows that this life is worth crossing oceans for when she sees me dreaming freely, unburdened by the weight she once carried. 

She has finally reached the top of her climb, and there is no turning back.

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Filiz Fish is a Turkish-American writer from Los Angeles, California. An alumna of the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio, she has been recognized by the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, the National Poetry Quarterly, and the National Council of Teachers of English. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Scapegoat Review, and more. In her free time, she enjoys reading and listening to music.