I hadn’t heard from my relatives in Iran for days—not since the university protests broke out again and another schoolgirl was killed by the Revolutionary Guard in Ardabil.

I checked my phone incessantly for news, and scrolled through social media, even though it gave me nightmares. I couldn’t sleep or eat. I walked around my home in Missoula, Montana in a state of suspended animation. Every part of me wanted to be on those streets in Iran.

I texted an endless stream of questions. Two hours later, after I had fallen into a fitful sleep, my entire body trembling on high alert, I heard from Ali that Noor was still alive.

My experience as a child of the revolution

My mother was nine months pregnant with me in 1978 when she left Iran on the brink of revolution. It was the last flight from Tehran to the United States for the next 44 years.

We landed in Minneapolis, but we never fully settled there. Growing up, my parents always had a suitcase packed in the corner, waiting to go back “home” to Iran. Every night my mother, father, and grandmother sat glued to the television or radio, hoping for news from Iran that the mullahs had been ousted, that the Iran-Iraq war was ending, that it would be time to return home at last. But that time never came.

Things were getting worse, not better. By 1999, I could not bear to watch Iran on a television screen or hear about my native country through weekly phone calls with aunts and cousins left behind. They told stories of a feminist movement afoot, led by children of the revolution—people like me who were born during those most precarious years. I decided it was time to join the fight.