Why did my Persian family call my baby a hazelnut, an apple and a liver?

When Cyrus was born, I thought we’d done reasonably well by giving him one name.

His Persian family had other ideas.

Before long, he was a hazelnut. Then an apple. A flower.

And somebody’s liver.

The last one required a little more explanation.

One of the things I loved about watching H’s family with Cyrus was the language that appeared around him almost immediately. These weren’t formal lessons in Persian culture. Nobody was standing over his Moses basket with flash cards.

They were simply the words people used when they loved him. And there were rather a lot of them.

Becoming a mother at 40 already made me conscious of everything I thought I ought to know.

Then there was the small matter of raising a child who belonged to a culture I hadn’t grown up in.

I couldn’t teach Cyrus Persian childhood from memory because I hadn’t had one. H and his family could give him something I couldn’t: the words, songs and little expressions that had once surrounded them.

Cyrus couldn’t understand any of this yet. But perhaps understanding wasn’t the point.

One of the first Persian nicknames Cyrus received came from his auntie, his ammeh.

She called him fandogh koochooloo, little hazelnut.

And frankly, it suited him.

He was tiny, round-faced and completely adored. There was something deliciously affectionate about comparing this very small human we’d produced to something you might find in the baking aisle.

I didn’t need to speak fluent Persian to understand what she meant.

Her face told me.

That’s something I’ve learned from being part of a Persian family. At first, you translate everything. Then, slowly, you begin to understand the things that don’t translate quite so easily

One cold day, Cyrus acquired spectacularly rosy cheeks.

H looked at him and called him sib-e sorkh, red apple.

Another piece of fruit had entered the family vocabulary.

It made perfect sense when I looked at him. His cheeks were bright red and round, the sort babies develop after being outside that make them look as though somebody has been at them with the blusher.

And I loved that H had a phrase for it.

It wasn’t something he’d invented for Cyrus. It was language that came from somewhere else, from his own culture and memories. A tiny piece of Persia had wandered into our British family life because our baby had cold cheeks.

Then came jigaram.

This one stopped me.

Jigar means liver, and here was an internal organ apparently being deployed as an expression of great affection.

I was British enough to think hearts had the romantic-organ market fairly well sewn up.

Apparently, I’d married into a family prepared to broaden the anatomical repertoire.

Of all Cyrus’s Persian terms of endearment, this was the one that fascinated me most because translating affection word for word rather misses the point.

Within Persian language and family life, jigaram is used as a deeply affectionate expression for someone precious.

What sounded wonderfully peculiar to my English ears sounded completely natural coming from Cyrus’s Persian family.

I didn’t need to start referring to H as my liver over breakfast. I needed to understand that another language could locate love somewhere entirely different in the body.

As if hazelnuts, apples and internal organs weren’t enough, Cyrus’s auntie had another name for him.

Gol-e sonbol.

Hyacinth flower.

This one required considerably less cultural adjustment on my part.

Flowers and affection I could manage.

There was something rather lovely about hearing all these names gather around him. Some made immediate sense to me. Others needed explaining. Some simply made me laugh. But all of them belonged to Cyrus. Not officially, obviously. His birth certificate remained reassuringly free of fruit and major organs. Within his family, though, they became part of the language of loving him.

That’s the distinction I didn’t understand at first.

If I’d encountered jigaram in a Persian phrasebook, I might have read an explanation involving the liver, raised an eyebrow and carried on to the section about ordering coffee.

Hearing it used towards my baby was different.

There was a face attached to the word. A voice. An auntie cuddling him. His dad looking at those ridiculous red cheeks.

The dictionary translation suddenly became the least interesting part. Because families don’t communicate in dictionary definitions. Words acquire meaning through the people who say them.

Terms of affection are one of the ways language becomes tied to emotion, family and relationships.

But I don’t want to turn every interaction with a baby into a developmental exercise.

I have the same reservation here that I have when we talk about singing to babies. Parenting advice has a habit of turning perfectly ordinary acts of love into another thing women ought to be doing correctly.

H’s family weren’t calling Cyrus these names because they’d read that bilingual cultural exposure was good for him.

They called him them because they loved him. The cultural inheritance happened anyway.

I see that much more clearly now.

Cyrus didn’t know what fandogh koochooloo meant.

He wasn’t pondering the linguistic peculiarities of jigaram.

He certainly wasn’t lying in his cot considering what it meant to have a British mum and a Persian dad.

He simply heard people who loved him.

A voice.
A song.
A nickname.
A word repeated so often that eventually it feels like home.

This may be the part that matters most to me now.

As a new mum, I carried that familiar burden of feeling responsible for absolutely everything.

Was he eating enough? Sleeping enough? Developing properly? Was I stimulating him sufficiently? Had I sterilised the thing I was supposed to sterilise?

And somewhere in there, I also wondered how we would raise a child between two cultures.

I needn’t have worried quite so much.

Culture was already happening around him.

It was in the Persian music playing in our house. It was in the lalaei we used at nap time. It was in food, celebrations and conversations I didn’t always understand.

And it was in the ridiculous little names people called him while changing his nappy.

I couldn’t give Cyrus memories of growing up Persian because they weren’t mine. H and his family could give him something else: pieces of their own.

When Cyrus was tiny, I thought these names were simply one of the charming peculiarities of marrying into a Persian family.

Now I see them differently.

Before he could speak Persian himself, he knew its sounds. Before he understood that he had a British mum and a Persian dad, both cultures were already turning up in his ordinary life.

I used to think raising a child between cultures would mean consciously teaching him about each half of himself.

Some of it does.

But some of the most important bits happen when nobody is trying particularly hard.

They’re in the food on the table. The music playing while somebody cooks. The relatives talking over one another. The celebrations that appear every year. The words a grandmother, auntie or dad instinctively reaches for when a baby is placed in their arms.

Just as a Persian lalaei could soothe Cyrus before he understood its lyrics, these strange and lovely little names surrounded him with affection before he knew what they meant.

And if your children are growing up between cultures, which words from each side of the family have followed them through childhood?

Occasional stories, experiments, discoveries and quests from Saffron & Cyrus.