Build a boat that can withstand misfortune, the sign reads, but the M is missing, like the gap of a broken tooth, so instead it reads: isfortune. A shameless lie. Nothing is fortune—not these wilting sunflower-yellow walls, nor the stench of piss-soaked diapers in the pail.

“Lotfan!” Even he knows Farsi words claw at my heart differently.

Not today.

I shut Anne Carson’s Glass, Irony and God, angry at the line: Tomorrow, I’m going to visit my mother.

What I cannot make him understand: his boat never stood a chance.

Those seeds from Tehran clawed their way to life after I tossed them into the grassy area behind our house. I was simply emptying my pockets, searching for that photo of my mother, still with hair. Not my fault that our backyard bordered a nature protection area, where our ecologist neighbor Margaret, chair of the HOA, patrolled once a week, policing rogue plants. Only natives allowed: evergreen, bigleaf maple, huckleberry, sword fern.

The honey locusts grew fast, thin trunks snaking awakening from the dirt, roots lacing the dark underground. They outgrew my son within three weeks—while Margaret was vacationing in Cancún. I came to love their golden buds, learned to look beyond the finger-sized thorns jutting from their trunks.

My mother gifted me those seed pods during the first breast-less walk of her life, behind Beheshti Hospital in Tehran, a black chador pulled over her pink hospital gown. Her skin battered, punctured by syringes again and again. I remember her stooping to pick up the seeds scattered beneath our feet like lost eyes of ancient statues.

She looked like a crumpled piece of paper—a woman who had lost a son to a war with a country she'd never set foot in; whose only daughter, me, lived across the world and could visit only two weeks a year because of shrinking maternity leave, a shrinking bank account, and the shrinking patience of an American husband.

Her own husband was a man with an artery so clogged it no longer let in life.

“Plant these when you go back to America,” she said in her glassy voice.

I wish I’d asked while I still could: Why, Mama? Why?

Two days later, she’s back, holding up her daughter’s hand. “She’s bleeding,” she explains. I bite my lips to not say, So what? Women bleed-words, dreams, memories.

“They have to be taken down,” she says.

“No.”

“Why not?”

My mother was a sunflower of a woman, I open my mouth to say, but my son roars from upstairs, awakens from a ten-minute nap, that bull of a child, screaming like he’s chased by shadow-hunters.

I needed an immigration lawyer—but for plants.

“My roots are here,” she said every time.

I’m from the Middle East, my fear's proportional to my nationality. “No,” I tell her. “I’m not.”

My son’s is believing I’m a soft Mama, the kind who kisses away bruises, spreads butter on bread, sings Lalayee at night, can save broken boats.

One day next week, after I’m stuffed thick with bad news from the motherland, I catch Margaret through the kitchen window, a syringe in her hand, injecting blue poison into woody veins.

My son, sleep-webbing his eyes, will watch me blizzard out of the house, erupt like a tsunami, wild and untamed, will watch me yank out the fire axe from beneath the sink and hack down the trees myself.

Hack.

Hack.

“Happy now?” he’ll hear me scream at Margaret who has gone pale as imported bananas, docile as a can of beans, fear a gray stone in her eyes. Those crazy immigrants.

Not now nor then—neither in Farsi nor in English—will I ever find the words to explain that all I ever wanted was to say, like Anne Carson: Tomorrow, I’m going to visit my mother.

And have it be true.