Stronger Than I Think

Raising a child as an immigrant is a particular kind of challenge that multiplies the ordinary difficulties of parenthood with the specific weight of doing it without the structures that were built to hold you: the extended family nearby, the community that has known you long enough to help without being asked, the language that carries nuance without effort, the cultural codes that make certain conversations unnecessary because everyone already understands. None of this was available to her in the way it would have been at home. She had to build it, piece by piece, from the materials at hand.

But something unexpected happened in that building.

She discovered that raising her child well required her to raise herself at the same time. The presence that a child demands, the quality of attention, the honesty about your own fears and limits that good motherhood requires, became a curriculum she had not signed up for but could not avoid. She grew more mindful. More present. Lighter in spirit in a way that is different from the lightness of freedom chosen in youth: this was the lightness of someone who had been tested and had not collapsed.

She began doing things she had never done before. The comfort zone she had arrived with, already expanded by the act of leaving Iran, expanded further. Each new thing she attempted was evidence against the voice that said she could not. Events she organised. Spaces she entered. Versions of herself she tried on and kept.

Eight years passed.

Eight years in Cyprus, in a country that is small enough to feel knowable and complex enough to always offer something new. Eight years of dancing when she wanted to dance, of building when she wanted to build, of being a mother and an immigrant and a creative person and a woman who refused to accept that limits are anything other than temporary conditions of the mind.

In her storytelling video, Taba speaks directly. There is no distance between the woman and the story she is telling, because she is not reconstructing the past from safety. She is describing an ongoing process, a life still in motion, still discovering what it is capable of. The camera does not make her smaller. She uses it the way she uses everything: as a space in which to be exactly who she is.

What she has learned, and what she offers to anyone willing to hear it, is deceptively simple. Limits exist only in the mind. She does not say this as a slogan. She says it as testimony, earned across eight years of choosing, again and again, to test whether the limit was real or only believed. Most of the time, it was only believed.

She is much stronger than she once thought. She knows this now. And knowing is the freedom she came for.

She came to Cyprus to be free.

The word carries its full weight when you understand where she came from. Iran, for a woman who wanted to dance, who wanted to run events, who wanted to occupy public space with energy and creativity and visibility, is a country that places specific and enforced limits on what a woman's body is permitted to express. To leave was not only a geographical decision. It was a declaration: that she would not continue to organise her life around what was forbidden to her, that she would find the place where her instincts were not illegal, where the things she needed to do in order to be herself could simply be done.

Cyprus received her. And then life, as it does, became more complex and more rich than any single intention could contain.

She became a mother.

HERS

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