On Mother’s Day, I Will Mourn Alongside the Grieving Parents of Minab

A video of Makan Nasiri has been shared over and over on social media in recent weeks. It starts off with vignettes familiar to so many parents: a young child opening the door to be surprised by a birthday cake, then walking with friends, then dancing joyfully with an older relative. Halfway through, though, there’s a sharp transition. Nasiri was a student at Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, Iran. The rest of the video documents the immediate aftermath of the attack on the school in the opening salvo of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran.

Nasiri is the only person whose body has yet to be found since the U.S. bombed the elementary school three times, with one strike hitting the prayer hall where students were sheltering. His parents report they have only found a single sneaker belonging to their son.

“I was terrified by the idea of having to place Makan in the grave, I couldn’t stand that,” Nasiri’s mother, Asieh Rahinejad, said during an address at a memorial service for the killed students. “I prayed to God for help, and it may explain why we couldn’t find him.”

This Mother’s Day, like every day that has passed since I first saw that video, I will be thinking of Makan Nasiri’s parents, and of the fact that Makan was so dearly loved that the whole world can feel his family’s devotion through 30 seconds of home videos. As I treasure my own day with my own kid, I will remind myself that the only thing that separates me from Asieh Rahinejad is the location of our birth.

I will also be thinking of Julia Ward Howe, the activist who issued the antiwar Mother’s Day Proclamation in 1870, urging for the adoption of a mother’s day devoted to peace. In her proclamation, Howe wrote:

We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs. From the bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own. It says: “Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”

These twin demands — to refuse to allow our children to be used as tools of harm, and to call for disarmament — may be more technically complex now in 2026 than they were in 1870, but they are no less urgent. Across Southwest Asia, kids are forced to deal with the direct and immediate terrors of imperial aggression; there’s nothing the parents in Minab, or southern Lebanon, or Gaza, can do to shield their children from the reality of Israeli and U.S. impunity. Meanwhile, those of us parenting in the U.S. are doing it through a looking glass — the U.S war machine is all around us, but we’re often physically divorced from the violence it inflicts outwards.

Some of this pervasiveness is more obvious: Walk down the toy aisle and you’re greeted with play guns and army action figures, billions of dollars of which are sold globally each year. Ever-present Marvel movies get made with direct support from the U.S. military. Video games like Call of Duty act as pro-war propaganda while letting players reenact killing people abroad for entertainment. The video game-to-armed forces pipeline is so fruitful that the military has used it as an explicit recruiting tool.

But then there are the more subtle ways in which the U.S. military manages to seep into daily life. When I make jam with my kid, using the recipes passed down through my own Iranian family, it will be hard to forget that the logo the Ball Corporation puts on its ubiquitous canning jars was also found in the debris of the Tomahawk missile that hit the elementary school in Minab. Ball Aerospace, a subsidiary of Ball Corporation, supplied parts for Tomahawk missiles before being spun off and sold to BAE Systems in 2024.

When I read my child some of her favorite books about space, and she inevitably brings up watching the Artemis launch earlier this year, I will remember that Lockheed Martin made the Orion spacecraft central to that mission. I’ll also remember that, just weeks before that launch, the U.S. tested out a new Lockheed Martin missile on the first day of war against Iran. That missile sent a spray of steel pellets into a sports hall in Lamerd, Iran, where a girls’ volleyball team was practicing. More than 20 people were killed; the youngest of them was 2 years old, the same age as my own child.

The U.S. war machine, from the military to its contractors to the political figures and media that ensure it runs smoothly, has intertwined itself into so many aspects of our culture, from math competitions to coloring books. And that’s before we get into the direct implication of our tax dollars; some estimates put the cost of the war on Iran at $72 billion, which comes as the Trump administration demands a military budget of $1.5 trillion for one year alone.

The bombing of the Minab elementary school is far from the only time that those of us in the U.S. have been implicated in the slaughter of children or bombing of crucial civilian infrastructure, whether it’s through U.S. funding, or U.S.-made weapons, or the U.S. military itself doing the killing. Before Minab, there was the 2015 attack on the Doctors Without Borders trauma center in Kunduz, Afghanistan, which the U.S. bombed in intense airstrikes, killing 42 people. The 2018 Saudi Arabian bombing of a school bus in Yemen, an attack in which 40 children were killed, was done with U.S.-made weaponry. In its latest war in Lebanon, Israel killed a classroom’s worth of children each day with U.S. backing. That followed Israel’s killing of more than 20,000 children in Gaza — again, committed with U.S. financing and weapons. This will continue until we actively force it to stop.

This Mother’s Day, I will mourn alongside those mothers in Minab, some of whom continued for weeks to sleep beside their children’s graves. And while I do that, I’ll be thinking about Howe’s proclamation: what it means to be “too tender” to raise a generation that normalizes the killing of kids, and how we can turn that tenderness into a political practice.