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

When Cyrus was born, I thought H and I had done pretty well by agreeing on one name. Finding something that worked across two cultures had taken some consideration, but we’d settled on Cyrus, a name with Persian roots that felt at home in Britain. It suited him, we both loved it and, after nine months of pregnancy and giving birth at 40, I considered the matter closed.

His Persian family had other ideas. Within weeks, our little boy had acquired an impressive collection of affectionate nicknames. He was a hazelnut, a red apple, a flower and, rather unexpectedly, somebody’s liver. I was still getting used to being called Mum, and here was my baby being compared to items from the greengrocer, the garden centre and the butcher’s shop. I found the whole thing required a little more explanation.

One of the loveliest parts of marrying into a Persian family has been discovering how freely affection finds its way into ordinary conversation. There are expressions that sound beautiful even before you understand them, while others definitely need a bit of translation. When Cyrus arrived, I began hearing them more frequently. His auntie had her favourites, H had his, and every new nickname revealed another little part of Persian family life.

Nobody was formally teaching Cyrus about his heritage. There were no Persian vocabulary lessons and nobody was standing over him with flash cards explaining the cultural significance of hazelnuts. His family just spoke to him in the language that came naturally to them, accompanied by virtual smiles. Cyrus couldn’t understand the words, but I could see how much affection was being poured into them.

As a British mum raising a child with a Persian dad, I initially thought I would have to teach him everything. But H’s family showed me how much could happen in conversation via an iPad.

One of Cyrus’s earliest nicknames came from his Persian auntie, his ammeh, who called him fandogh koochooloo, meaning little hazelnut. It suited him rather well. Like most newborns, Cyrus spent much of his early life sleeping, feeding and looking faintly astonished by the world. He had lovely round baby cheeks, tiny fingers that somehow managed to grip with determination and an expression that suggested he was reserving judgement on the entire business of being born.

I could see why his auntie thought of a hazelnut. There was something so affectionate about the way she said it, the words tumbling out whenever she saw him, along with azizaam. I didn’t speak fluent Persian, and I couldn’t have explained the finer points of the language, but I didn’t need a translation to understand the sentiment. Her face did most of the work, and Cyrus, entirely unaware that he’d been named after something you might find in a packet of mixed nuts, seemed perfectly content with the arrangement.

That was one of my earliest lessons in Persian family life. You can spend so much time learning what words mean, but their emotional significance often comes from watching how people use them. A little hazelnut might sound like an unusual description of a baby in English, but coming from his auntie, it was perfectly natural. These weren’t just cute little alternatives to his name. They were expressions his family reached for instinctively, part of a language of affection that existed long before Cyrus came along.

One really cold day, Cyrus developed the sort of rosy cheeks that babies seem to get after a few minutes outdoors. They were bright red, as though somebody had been a little overenthusiastic with the blusher. H took one look at him and called him sib-e sorkh, meaning red apple. Another piece of fruit had entered the family vocabulary, and I began to wonder whether we might work our way through the contents of the fruit bowl.

I remember thinking how perfectly the description fitted him. His cheeks looked exactly like two little red apples, and H said it with such obvious affection that I found myself smiling before he’d finished speaking. He hadn’t sat down to invent a special nickname for Cyrus or searched for a suitably poetic description. He just reached for an expression from his own language, one that captured what he saw and how he felt about our son.

H had grown up surrounded by a different collection of words and memories. His childhood in Iran had been shaped by conversations I hadn’t heard, songs I hadn’t grown up singing and traditions I was still learning about. Now some of those things were finding their way into our son’s life, not through any grand effort to preserve his heritage, but because H was being himself.

There we were, an ordinary family in Britain, looking at a baby with cold cheeks, and suddenly a little piece of H’s Persian childhood had entered the room. It made me wonder how many other expressions Cyrus would grow up hearing without ever realising they belonged to a much longer family story.

Of all the Persian terms of endearment I encountered after Cyrus was born, jigaram was undoubtedly the one that required the most explanation. The word jigar means liver, and jigaram literally means my liver, although in Persian it is used as a deeply affectionate expression for somebody precious. This was news to me. I was comfortable with darling and love, but I had always assumed the heart had secured its position as the organ most closely associated with affection. Apparently, the Persians had decided there was room for another contender.

I couldn’t help laughing when H explained it. To my English ears, calling somebody your liver sounded more like the beginning of a conversation with a consultant than an expression of love. I imagined greeting H over breakfast with, “Good morning, my liver,” and decided it might take some getting used to. I could understand comparing a baby to something small and sweet, or even to a beautiful flower, but an internal organ was an unexpected choice.

Yet the more I heard the expression, the more I understood its warmth. In Persian, jigaram is not a strange anatomical observation. It is an affectionate way of addressing somebody dearly loved. It can convey tenderness, closeness and the sort of fondness that doesn’t have an English equivalent. When Cyrus’s family used it, there was nothing odd about it. Their voices softened and their faces lit up. The translation was entirely my problem.

It also made me think about the expressions we use in English without questioning them. We tell children we could eat them up, describe somebody as a little pickle and sometimes call a baby a sausage. None of these would make much sense to somebody encountering British English for the first time, especially if they were trying to understand why we appeared so determined to compare our offspring to things we might eat.

It made me think about my own grandad, who rarely called me by my actual name. To him, I was Pigeon, or Pidge for short. I never thought much about it as a child. It was what he called me, and I knew who he meant. I couldn’t tell you why he chose a pigeon rather than a sparrow or a robin, but it was his name for me, and that made it special. Looking back, I suppose it was no stranger than calling a baby a hazelnut or a red apple. The difference was that I’d grown up hearing it, so I never thought to question it.

These days, whenever pigeons visit our garden, I find myself feeling rather fond of them. They’re hardly everybody’s favourite birds, and I know plenty of people regard them as little more than a nuisance, but I can’t bring myself to see them that way. They remind me of Grandad and the name he used for me. It’s funny how something as ordinary as a pigeon pottering about the garden can bring somebody back to you, even for a moment. I wonder whether Cyrus will feel something similar one day when he hears one of his Persian nicknames, or sees a hazelnut or a hyacinth.

So perhaps calling a child liver wasn’t so strange after all. It was just another reminder that affection doesn’t always survive a word-for-word translation. Sometimes you have to hear a phrase spoken by somebody who means it before you understand what it is really saying. I didn’t need to start calling H my liver over breakfast, but I did need to appreciate that another language could express love in ways I had never considered.

Just when I thought we’d exhausted the possibilities of affectionate naming, Cyrus’s auntie introduced another expression: gol-e sonbol, meaning hyacinth flower. This one, I confess, took less adjustment. Flowers have always seemed a perfectly reasonable way of describing somebody lovely, and the idea of our little boy being compared to a hyacinth was beautiful. After the liver, it was also a relief to return to the garden.

The hyacinth also has a special place in Persian culture. It is one of the traditional elements of the haft-sin, the symbolic table prepared for Nowruz, the Persian New Year, where its flowers are associated with spring and renewal. A flower that appears at the beginning of a new season seemed fitting for a baby who had brought such enormous change into our lives.

By this point, Cyrus had accumulated enough affectionate names to keep a small florist and greengrocer in business, with the occasional contribution from the butcher’s shop. Yet each nickname seemed to reveal something different about the person saying it. His auntie’s little hazelnut was a tiny, cherished baby. H’s red apple had the sort of cheeks that demanded attention. Jigaram conveyed a deeper tenderness, while gol-e sonbol brought a little poetry into the proceedings.

None of these names appeared on his birth certificate, which remained free of fruit, flowers and organs. But within the family, they were becoming part of the language people used around him.

I had waited a long time to have Cyrus, and although I was delighted to finally be holding him, I quickly discovered that motherhood comes with a number of things to think about. Was he feeding enough? Was he sleeping too much, or not enough? Was I doing everything properly? Had I sterilised whatever needed sterilising, and why did the contents of one tiny baby’s changing bag seem to require the organisational skills of an expedition leader?

Alongside all the anxieties of new motherhood was another question. How would we raise a child who belonged to two cultures when only one of those cultures was familiar to me? I grew up British, while H grew up in Iran. Our childhoods had been shaped by different languages, customs, family gatherings and celebrations. There were things I could tell Cyrus about my own upbringing, but I couldn’t give him first-hand memories of growing up Persian because they weren’t mine.

I wanted Cyrus to feel connected to both sides of his family without feeling that he had to choose between them. At first, I imagined this would require a great deal of conscious effort. We would have to introduce Persian traditions, explain celebrations, encourage the language and make sure he understood something about the country his dad came from. I could already picture myself trying to remember the correct pronunciation of words while H patiently explained why I’d just said something different from what I’d intended.

Watching H and his family with Cyrus made me realise that cultural identity isn’t built through carefully planned lessons. Much of it develops through ordinary family life, in the things people say and do without giving them much thought.

It was there in the Persian music playing around the house, and the lalaei, or Persian lullabies, we used to soothe him at nap time. It was there in the food we prepared, the celebrations we observed and the affectionate expressions that appeared whenever somebody picked him up. I didn’t always understand the words, but I could see the connections they were creating.

I’ve always been fascinated by language, especially the way a perfectly ordinary expression in one culture can sound wonderfully different in another. The more time I spent around H’s family, the more I realised that translating a word tells you only part of its story. You can understand the literal meaning of something without appreciating why somebody would say it, when they might use it or what it means to the people hearing it.

If I’d encountered jigaram in a phrasebook, I might have read the definition, raised an eyebrow and moved on to the section about ordering coffee. It would have been an interesting linguistic curiosity, and something to mention over dinner. Hearing it spoken to my baby was different. There was a person attached to the word, a voice, a smiling face and a pair of arms desperately wanting to hold him from a distance.

The same was true of fandogh koochooloo. On paper, little hazelnut is a straightforward translation. In our family, it came with the memory of his auntie looking at him with such obvious affection that the words seemed secondary. And sib-e sorkh wasn’t just the Persian equivalent of red apple. It was H looking at our son’s rosy cheeks and finding a description that belonged to his own language.

These were small moments, but they helped me understand how family expressions become meaningful. We don’t remember every word somebody says to us when we’re very young, but voices and repeated phrases become associated with the people closest to us.

One thing I have become increasingly wary of as an older new mum is the tendency to turn every ordinary interaction with a child into an opportunity for measurable development. Sing to your baby because it supports language acquisition, read to your toddler because it improves vocabulary. Talk constantly because it stimulates the brain. There always seems to be advice explaining why something perfectly natural should be treated as an important parental responsibility.

I’m not dismissing the value of talking, reading or singing to children. But I think we lose sight of the little things of doing these things because we enjoy being with them. Parenthood comes with enough advice, much of it delivered with the unspoken suggestion that failure to follow it will have consequences somewhere down the line. I didn’t need another reason to wonder whether I was doing it right.

H’s family weren’t calling Cyrus jigaram because they had studied the benefits of early bilingual exposure. His auntie wasn’t describing him as a hazelnut to improve his cultural awareness. They were doing what came naturally. They loved him, and those were some of the words they used to show it. The fact that Cyrus was also hearing another language and becoming familiar with expressions from his dad’s culture was a lovely consequence, rather than the purpose of the interaction.

For me, that takes some of the pressure out of raising a child between cultures. There are traditions worth explaining and languages worth encouraging, but heritage doesn’t have to be delivered as a lesson every time.

Music has always been part of our home. H and I enjoy Persian songs, and long before Cyrus could understand their lyrics, he was hearing the language through melodies, conversations and the occasional enthusiastic singalong. Some of the music was familiar to H from his childhood, while other songs were ones we enjoyed together. Either way, it became part of the soundtrack to Cyrus’s early years.

Then there were the lalaei, the Persian lullabies that became part of our attempts to persuade a small, occasionally uncooperative human being that sleep was a perfectly reasonable activity. Like many new parents, I discovered that babies are not especially interested in your carefully constructed timetable. They have their own ideas about when the day should begin, when a nap is necessary and whether being placed in a cot constitutes an acceptable arrangement. I spent more time than I care to remember trying to work out whether Cyrus was tired, hungry or simply expressing a strong objection to the current management.

But there was something lovely about hearing a Persian lullaby in those quieter moments. I couldn’t have sung every word from memory, and I didn’t always understand the lyrics without H explaining them. Yet I loved knowing that the songs Cyrus heard were connected to the childhood his dad had experienced.

I didn’t need to pretend I had grown up with the same traditions. I could learn about them, enjoy them and help make space for them in our family. Cyrus, meanwhile, could grow up hearing English and Persian in the same house, alongside the music, food and family conversations that made up his everyday life. I doubt many multicultural families would recognise their lives in the tidy diagrams sometimes used to explain cultural identity. Ours was a family getting on with things, with a little more Persian music than some of our neighbours.

Over time, I began recognising the collection of Persian expressions that had become part of our family vocabulary. Their spellings can vary when written in English, but these are the versions I remember hearing.

I still smile at the variety. Fruit, flowers and an internal organ might seem an unlikely collection of pet names, but every one of them was spoken with tenderness. I doubt anybody using them gave much thought to how they might sound when translated into English. They were personal family nicknames.

Looking back, I think one of the most reassuring things about those early months was realising that I wasn’t solely responsible for teaching Cyrus everything about his identity. As a new mum, one who had her baby at 40, I sometimes felt an enormous responsibility to get everything right. I wanted him to have a happy childhood, to feel secure and loved, and to grow up understanding where he came from. I also wanted to make sure that being raised in Britain didn’t mean losing the Persian part of his family history.

But culture was already finding its way into his life without my having to organise it. It was happening when H spoke Persian, when family called to see how he was, when music played in the kitchen and when we celebrated traditions that had been part of H’s childhood long before we met. It was happening through food, family stories and those affectionate little nicknames. None of it required me to become an expert in Persian culture overnight, which was fortunate because I was still trying to become competent at looking after a baby.

His experience was always going to be his own, shaped by both sides of his family. What I could do was make sure there was room for those different influences to exist together, without treating one as more important or authentic than the other.

When Cyrus was tiny, I thought his Persian nicknames were one of the charming peculiarities of marrying into a family from another culture. I enjoyed hearing them, laughed at the translations and occasionally wondered whether there was a limit to the number of edible items a baby could be compared to.

Cyrus arrived in the world with one carefully chosen name, but his family had an entire language of affection waiting for him. I still find the literal translation of jigaram really funny, and I suspect I always will.

Does your family have a term of endearment that sounds completely bizarre when translated literally? I’d love to hear it, particularly if it involves another unexpected item of fruit or human anatomy. And if your children are growing up between cultures, which words, songs or family expressions have followed them through childhood?

Occasional stories, experiments, discoveries and questions about family life, women’s health, Persian culture and everything in between, from Saffron & Cyrus.