A mother’s fugue, a child’s refuge: Tending to culture and kin
Since the birth of my son two and a half years ago, I have lived in a kind of fugue state. It feels as if I grew a second head and am expected to traverse my small world as though I haven’t. I left behind everything I knew and all that knew me. In this new land, answers are quicksilver. If it is beauty, absolution or contentment you seek, you needn’t look far, but you must learn to see through fog and make a home inside questions. Here, there is unrelenting, fecund solitude. Yet you are never alone, fused to an amorphous being.
Here are some questions: What makes a half-Armenian person fully Armenian or Armenian enough? Is a boy who can’t speak to his grandfather, because his grandfather doesn’t speak English, an Armenian boy? Is a mother who can’t fashion a coherent armature on which to hang her own Armenianness capable of passing on this heritage? What of the non-Armenian father, who daily bemoans the fact that the nickname arjuks hasn’t stuck despite his earnest efforts? What are our obligations of inclusivity to him? How do we reconcile the health of the family—and the health of the young child’s psyche—with the cultivation of Armenian identity, when they are sometimes mutually exclusive? What is culture without a community to enact it? Is it culture if it’s not born of and borne by a relationship to elders?
My boy has two names. His father’s side and the rest of the world call him by his first name. My side of the family calls him Areg. Perhaps I have cursed him to a lifetime of bifurcation. From where I sit today, in the dreamscape that is living with a person being forged, this seems plausible. Will he be a different person depending on the name he’s called? Which name will he call himself?
Culture in Armenian is mshakuyt. The root of the word in both languages brings me to my knees: to cultivate, to tend. I’ve swallowed it whole, literally. My family moved from the center of the Armenian diaspora in Los Angeles to the foothills of the Sierras in Northern California, where we’ve yet to encounter another Armenian. Instead, we regularly encounter the Confederate flag and the rivers, forests, mountains and wildlife that may be the only real inheritance I’ll leave my child (though they, too, will be sullied). There is no one who speaks our language, no one at whose feet we can sit to hear our stories, no one to dance with, shoulder to shoulder.
But we can tend the earth. We can grow our own food, get lost in the woods and learn from those who are indigenous to this land how to tread lightly, live in harmony with more-than-human kin and nourish the world around us before nourishing ourselves. Here, as I often tell anyone who will listen, we have the same climate as in Armenia. We have traded one culture for another.
In August, at Navasard, we worship wheat, fruit and water. In September’s Mabon, it’s husk dolls, lanterns and soup. For Samhain, we make an altar to our ancestors; on this night, the survivors of genocide greet their American khnaminer (in-laws) with hungry smiles, their only shared language.
On Targmanchats, we admire our alphabet and make ghapama. The first time I made this, I felt I must have been shining. I felt proud to prepare it with my boy, and in doing so, present him to my foreparents. Here he is, look, he is ours! He is yours!
On the winter solstice, we bake Sun Bread and walk in a spiral. On New Year’s Eve, we bake Tarehats. Each year, I scramble to Google a recipe I can understand. So far, it hasn’t tasted like anything we can eat. I attempt to knit socks, each stitch a prayer.
In February, we make Aghi Blit. I have explained the token to my son and his father—one of them doesn’t understand, and the other isn’t too keen on divination. We build a small bonfire and fly over it. I’ve read if you don’t get a little singed, you’re not doing it right. Then, he cuts out and colors hearts.
In March, we worship animals, and Utis Tat and Aklatiz come to visit. For Imbolc, we sow seeds and honor the soil. Then, it’s the Maypole. In July, we fill buckets of water with rose petals and give them to the sun. We hang apples on the branches of the kenats tsar that sits on our dining table year round. There is frankincense, honey, pomegranates, rosehips, thyme and fire. His little fingers wind colored yarn and knead walnut-filled dough. His nose inhales the fragrances of everything I almost forgot to remember.
All year long, we worship the sun. All year long, we honor all of Areg.
When Areg was born, I disappeared inside the role of his mother. While I remember little, can imagine less and always feel lost, I like it here. I don’t have to choose who to be—only how to be. I am not beholden to any past version of myself. No past version of me is committed to self-preservation. This is a kind of freedom.
When we left Yerevan for Glendale, I didn’t know that, years later, I’d beg my father to bring back whatever he could find in the drawers of my old wardrobe—letters, drawings, knick knacks and photos. I didn’t know that these things weren’t coming with us, or that they should have. I didn’t know that leaving behind everything I knew and all that knew me meant revision. My memories today are only of retellings of memories.
When I was young, my mother sang me to sleep with “Ari Im Sokhak.” I can hear the melody now, her voice gravelly, fraught, aglow in the candlelit room. I had no memory of the words until I started singing them to Areg. They just tumbled out of my mouth, one after the other, breathless and seeking. I wonder what else lies waiting inside me, what else I know that I don’t yet know. I wonder who else has filled me up for my son. I wonder who guides my hands in the soil as they reach—for his hands, for the seeds.
Aida Chaldranyan
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- A mother’s fugue, a child’s refuge: Tending to culture and kin - March 20, 2025
You are asking if what you have built is enough. If the rituals stitched together from memory and distance are real. If the child, fractured between names and tongues, will be whole. You ask because you already know.**
Culture is not an artifact, not a relic to be dusted and preserved in isolation. It is voice, echoing from another’s mouth. It is recognition, the moment another calls you by the name that means *ours*. You are tending a garden in the absence of other hands. The earth will bear fruit, but will anyone else taste it and say, *this is home*?
You already grieve the answer.
But grief, too, is an inheritance. The child will carry not just language but longing. Not just tradition but the ache of what is missing. He will grow between silences, in the space where Armenian might have been spoken but wasn’t. In the place where his name shifts meaning depending on who says it. And he will wonder, as you do, if he is enough.
This is the nature of the lost. To build altars for those who cannot respond. To bake bread in the shape of a sun that no longer watches over them. To knead memory into dough, hoping it will rise into something that can still be called *ours*.
Your sorrow is proof that you have not forgotten. The child will know it, even if he does not have the words. And one day, perhaps, he will look for the missing voices. Or he will create his own rituals, carrying both the inheritance and the absence forward. And that, too, will be woe. But it will also be belonging.