Mother's Day Lessons From a Vampire Weekend Mom: The New Yorker A few years ago, at a party in Washington, D.C., I started a conversation with a small, dark-haired, middle-aged woman standing next to me at the dessert table. She said her name - Najimieh Batmanglij - and I recognized her as the author of one of my favorite cookbooks, "Silk Road Cooking: A Vegetarian Journey," the dog-eared paperback from which my husband had just that week cooked a cumin-scented rice polow with lentils, dates, and currants. Najmieh and I talked a bit about the Persian cuisine she'd been studying, writing about, and preparing for years, and eventually the conversation turned to our kids. I mentioned that mine, then ten and thirteen, were into music. She mentioned something about her son playing in a band in New York. "What's it called?," I asked. Maybe I've heard of it. "Vampire Weekend," she said. Uh, yes, I "d heard of it. Anybody who listened to indie music at all had. They were four clean-cut Columbia grads who'd met in college and quickly created one of the most distinctive sounds and styles in contemporary rock - brainy, winsome lyrics peopled with characters out of a Whit Stillman movie or a Salinger story; a catchy, sunny amalgam of Afro pop and Anglo-American New Wave. A friend of mine's toddler had taken to singing, "Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?" from the backseat of the car. Najmieh's son was Rostam Batmanglij, the band's multi-instrumentalist, co-writer, and producer. It was the Fall of 2010; Vampire Weekend had released its second album earlier that year and had been touring for most of it. Najmieh said that she and the moms of the other band members - Ezra Koenig, Chris Baio, and Chris Tomson - had stayed in regular e-mail contact. Their correspondence dated back to the early days of the band, when Vampire Weekend had toured in a secondhand van that the moms all worried about. There were two children in the Batmanglij family, and Rostam's older brother, Zal, was a filmmaker in Los Angeles. I hadn't heard of him then, but a year later Zal would make his directing début with "Sound of My Voice," a creepy, well-wrought psychological thriller about a Southern California cult, which Zal co-wrote with his friend from Georgetown University, Brit Marling, who also starred in it. Zal's forthcoming movie, about an eco-terrorist group and the young woman who infiltrates it as a corporate spy, also stars his co-writer Marling, along with Alexander Skarsgard, Ellen Page, and Patricia Clarkson. That was the last I saw of Najimieh until a few weeks ago. With Vampire Weekend about to release its third album, "Modern Vampires of the City," on May 14th, and Zal's movie "The East" due out at the end of the month, I started thinking about the Batmanglij family and the particular alchemy that might have produced two such creatively successful children. I asked Najimieh if we could meet to chat about it, and she invited me for tea, which meant, since she was hosting, not just tea, but an array of Persian treats - warm baklava she'd just made, a tray of white mulberries and pistachios, little cucumbers, which Najimieh peeled and salted while we talked. It wasn't exactly that she was dispensing parenting advice - the conversation was looser and wider-ranging than that. Still, after talking with her, and later with Zal and Rostam, it seemed to me that some of the attitudes Najmieh and her husband, Mohammad, held about family life were inspiring enough to be distilled into a little list. Since it's Mothers Day weekend, and this is the Internet, here goes: Model creativity by being creative yourself, and in so doing, give your kids a realistic sense of how much work is involved. "My parents never really explicitly did anything to suggest that being a creative person in terms of your occupation is the goal," Rostam told me on the phone from his apartment in DUMBO. They never forced anything down our throat. They led by example. I have a lot of memories of my Mom up at 2 A.M. with a copy of her cookbook and some ancient manuscripts and another copy of her cookbook marked up with black Sharpie, just covered in comments. I feel like I have some of that, always wanting to make things better, revise and revise, when I'm producing a song. Her books, he said, "keep getting better and better. It's like one book she's been working on for twenty-five years. (Najmieh's "Food of Life: Ancient Persian and Modern Iranian Cooking and Ceremonies," published in 2011, is her most beautiful yet; its design was inspired by her sons, who told her she needed an update and had to include more practical information - what pots to use; where to buy ingredients; what kind of salt was best - for a new generation. The cover will remind fans of a Vampire Weekend album - no surprise since Rostam designed both - with its white borders, and airily-spaced, white Futura font.) Rostam's experience suggests a possible benefit to working at home where your kids can see some of what you do and how you do it. In his case, he eked out an extra creative bonus. His mom was sometimes so caught up in her cooking that she neglected to switch out the two CDs she had in her kitchen for years, and that Rostam remembers playing on repeat: Paul Simon's "Rhythm of the Saints" and the soundtrack of the movie "The Big Night" (lots of bouncy Louis Prima and Claudio Villa). "When you get to the point where you know something in-and-out like that," Rostam said, "it starts to sink in and affect who you are." Be open-ended in your expectations of your kids" lessons and activities. Najimieh said that both Zal and Rostam revealed what became their life-long interests at an early age. Zal saved his money for a camera as a kid, and he was always "fascinated by the characters of people who came to the house. He was very observant, always. And he made us laugh. We called him Woody Allen. Rostam was drawn to music and Najmieh enrolled him in flute lessons when he was six or seven. But, Zal said, "My parents let us get into these things without expectation. They didn't expect results out of the investment. We were never made to play for people at parties. It never felt oppressive. Rostam practiced his music a lot in private, in his room. One result, Zal said, was that "I had a shock when my brother turned out to be as good a musician as he was." On the other hand, creative activities as ends in themselves - or even as self-contained competitions - were more than fine. The Batmanglijs had an annual contest, for instance, in which they would each draw a portrait of the family, including the dog. The winner was not necessarily the best executed portrait but the one that showed the most personality and style. Rostam says the respect for a distinctive personal style stays with him to this day. That's one thing that's been really important to me with music - that the identity is preserved and recognizable. In the band we are always talking about wanting songs to sound Vampire Weekend-y. Don't be afraid to be D.I.Y. - or let your kids go that route. Both sons were aware of their parents having remade their lives and the kind of inventiveness and nerve in that project. Najmieh and Mohammad fled their native Iran after the revolution in 1976 and lived first as refugees in a small village in southern France, where Zal was born, then, after 1983, as immigrants to the United States. In Iran, Mohammad had worked in architecture and construction, but in the U.S. he changed tacks entirely and opened a small publishing company at first with the goal of publishing Najmieh's cookbooks. Now the publishing house, Mage, which he runs out of the couple's house in Georgetown, produces a range of books in English about Persian culture. Zal says, "Our parents really believed in D.I.Y. before it was fashionable. And now technology and culture have allowed my brother and I to bring D.I.Y. to the forefront of our lives. His parents had to remake their lives and start a company in which they initially did everything themselves - from editing to design to distribution - but "they also got to follow their hearts." When Zal started making independent films, he found his parent's example inspiring. So did Rostam, who after taking lessons to learn his first two instruments, flute and guitar, when he was still a kid, taught himself the other instruments he plays, as well as audio engineering. Don't make them do activities they fundamentally don't want to. Rostam and Zal attended The Potomac School, outside of Washington, a private school where sports like lacrosse and soccer are big. But, Najmieh says "My kids didn't want to play sports and these things, and they didn't have to. I didn't force them. Don't engage in activities you don't believe in yourself, just because you think your kids should. Some people I meet, they say they go to church because they want their kids to go to church. I say, do you believe it? They say no. I say don't do it; be honest. Kids are sharp and sensitive; they see through us. If you're an immigrant family and your kids aren't as interested in their roots as you'd hoped, don't despair till they're at least thirty. Najmieh teaches Persian cooking classes in her home, and has noticed that many of the people who take them are second-generation Iranian immigrants in their late twenties or early thirties, who have just recently gotten interested in learning how to cook and entertain in the Persian tradition. In the class, they recite Persian poetry when they sit down to eat. Kids with foreign backgrounds, for their first thirty years, they want to accomplish becoming part of American culture. But after thirty, they want to bring their roots to whatever they do. Najmieh said she detected a Persian influence for the first time on Vampire Weekend's new album, and when I mentioned that to Rostam he agreed. On the song "Worship You," he plays a synthesizer solo that was inspired by Persian folk music and when he played the song "Young Lion" for his parents, they said it reminded them of a Persian melody, too. Be positive about your kids" plans and dreams - not because you're sure they'll work out but because you have no idea what will happen and being negative is draining for everybody. When Rostam told her just after graduating from Columbia that he was planning to tour with his yet untested band, Najmieh worried a bit. But, she believed in him and that "everybody should have the chance to try the thing they really want to do." Besides, "what do we know? Nobody knows. Especially with the Internet, and in a field like music, everything is changing anyway. In September of 2010, Najmieh invited the other Vampire Weekend moms to tea at the hotel in New York where she was staying at the time. "If you guys want to come it would be great," she wrote in an e-mail. "let's enjoy our boys" health, hard work and success - no one knows what the future has in store for any of us." Indeed. Read Lizzie Widdicombe's Profile of Vampire Weekend.