I had my battles in my subconscious. At night, I dreamed again and again that I was in our apartment in Tehran, scrambling to find a piece of our old life to take away with me. I searched my cluttered desk; I opened the antique doors I had found in a village in northern Iran and had turned into cabinets; but before I could find anything, the government forces arrived. I would wake up sweating and ask myself why I continually dreamed of going back.

Despite this, we were determined to rebuild our lives. I won a fellowship at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism, and so, a year after leaving Tehran, we moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts. My daughter, Tina, began preschool, while Chayan, my son, started first grade. They began responding in English when we spoke to them in Persian, and asked for mac-and-cheese instead of the kebabs with aromatic Persian rice they used to love. My parents and in-laws visited, their suitcases filled with clothes and photo albums we had left behind. I watched my children’s anxiety lessen with each familiar face they saw. Our immediate insecurities were behind us, but we were still unaware of the challenges ahead.

Tina was seven and Chayan eight years old when, in early 2012, we sat paging through the Sunday New York Times together. When we reached the magazine, both kids stared at the cover, holding their breath. It was a close-up shot of orange and yellow flames, with a headline inside asking, Will Israel Attack Iran?

In a fearful voice, Chayan asked, “Mommy, is Judith’s country going to war with Iran?”

“I don’t want our countries to fight,” Tina added, a lump tightening in her throat.

Judith was our neighbors’ daughter, a gregarious girl from Israel who took the school bus every morning with our kids. The two girls jumped up and down together to keep warm at the bus stop. Seeing my children’s alarmed expressions, I told them that the chance of a war against Iran was slim, and even if there was a war, it would not affect any of their friendships. Tina nodded with relief, but I knew she was still learning to process her memories of Iran. A few months earlier, her teacher had shown me a story she had written in class. In it we had driven all the way from Tehran to Toronto. “I looked at the moon as we drove and wondered if I would see my grandpa again,” she had written.

At night, I dreamed again and again that I was in our apartment in Tehran, scrambling to find a piece of our old life to take away with me.

Chayan reacted differently. After seeing the Israel story, he looked at me suspiciously and a few days later began telling his friends he was Canadian and had never had any ties to Iran. I understood: My son was grappling to redefine his ties to his motherland. He felt Iran had banished him and his family, and separated him from his loved ones. And now, right or wrong, another country was threatening to wage a war against it. Iran was presented as a pariah state not only in The New York Times Magazine but also on National Public Radio, which we listened to every day. Its reports focused on how Iran was defying the international community’s requests to halt its nuclear program. I could tell that Iran, in the mind of my eight-year-old son, was a source of deep embarrassment.