did I move to Greece to avoid growing up?

“Aunt Kathleen, are you an adult?” My adorable 6-year-old niece leaned over the enormous counter in my parents’ suburban American kitchen this summer. We had discussed how I don’t have a car, (“even though you’re the oldest,” as one of my nephews pointed out with deep concern a few years ago), and how my home is small and in an apartment building, and how I live very, very far away.

“Aunt Kathleen, you really need a car,” another nephew told me very seriously as we sat eating chicken parmesan together in suburban New Jersey this fall.

Partly this concern about my lack of a car reflects that my nieces and nephews all live in the American suburbs or the Irish countryside, where one does in fact need a car. And my sister, who also lives in a city, does own a car, so it’s very confusing for them that I don’t, and haven’t, and probably won’t for a while, since they don’t live in a place with a metro and a somewhat adequate bus system and 5 grocery stores within 10 minutes of walking and a weekly laiki a few blocks away.

But the adult question has come up, and I suspect it’s come up more subtly for the adults around me. Am I just moving abroad on a whim and Peter Pan-ing my way through life in Greece, one Instagrammable coffee at a time?

Maybe escaping to a new country seems like a way of not having to grow up, if you’re raised on a stready diet of movies and tv shows that make life in various European capitals seem like one long vacation under the Mediterraean sun.

And true, I have achieved very few of the traditional adult milestones. I do not own a car (still! sorry Henry). I am not, and don’t have any desire to be, married or have kids. I don’t have an advanced degree, just a bachelor’s in English literature (useful!). I do now finally own a home, but that home is a one-bedroom apartment that is under 600 square feet. I just bought a real, decent bed for the first time in my life at age 40, something not from the cheapest section of IKEA.

I don’t always act like the American idea of an adult either. I quit my successful, high-paying corporate job eight years ago to go travel the world. I go out late (past 9pm!), stay up late, don’t talk about how I’m over the hill and crippled with back pain now that I’m 40. I do still buy a lot of stuff from IKEA, and I take the bus to get there. I am a fan of the cheap and cheerful summer vacation instead of the latest luxury resort. I wear bikinis instead of the modest, flattering black one-pieces that are de rigeur among women my age in the US (last summer, at my best friend’s house party in the Boston burbs, I felt terribly conspicuous launching myself down the slip ’n slide in a red bikini among the sea of black one-pieces).

But this life I have created abroad, as anyone else who has moved to a country they weren’t born in will tell you, has milestones all its own. Getting a residency permit (I now have a degree in Greek bureacracy, with a minor in Croatian bureacracy) is a feat that’s probably on par with planning a wedding, and instead of cake and champagne and a party you get a little ID with your face blown up weirdly big on it, plus years of heartburn and reams of paper.

Buying an apartment here, even though it’s small in size, was a multi-year effort where I had at least 5 full-on meltdowns and 7 existential crises. Even little things, like navigating grocery stores and bakeries and lines at the laiki, start out wildly challenging.

And let’s not even get into the complications of learning Greek, a language so difficult we use it as a byword for unintelligible in English (it’s all Greek to me! In Greece, in case you were wondering, they say “it’s all Chinese.” I don’t know what the Chinese say.) My life is so complicated that I have multiple lawyers, which concerned another nephew briefly (“is Aunt Kathleen in trouble?” he asked my mom, no she’s just in a constant bureacracy hell lol).

My business is another big one — I have not just an LLC but an S-Corp too. Yes, I am a corporation! Of one, but it still counts, at least tax-wise. Running a business from another country has its own set of challenges, like the fact that I have literally a dozen bank accounts, which is both insane and necessary. (Plus another lawyer there, and thankfully a very helpful and patient accountant who runs all the business stuff.)

My niece and I did have a good chat about this — I love telling my nieces about my business and my life, so that they have many examples in their life of what a woman can be (they have a lot of great ones in the family!).

But am I really an adult? Maybe the obsession with hitting those milestones is a particularly American one anyways, as is the thought I’ve often heard voiced that you’re not really an adult until you’ve hit them. Although I’ve lost count of how many people in Greece have wished me a marriage now that I have bought my apartment, which, thank you but it’s girly as hell in there, as it should be, and not designed with any man in mind.

Now I just have new milestones and struggles and accomplishments, ones that don’t fit on a wedding website or a baby registry or, indeed, in the two-car garage that I’ll never have. I do have a yearly 70-page tax form and those dozen bank accounts and all my lawyers and a passport that got so full years before it expired that I had to get a new enormous one, which is a different kind of chic than an enormous American kitchen island. My nieces and nephews will continue to be concerned about my lack of a car for quite a while, probably, and way too many people about my lack of a husband.

I will continue to deal with those concerns by buying more pale pink sheet sets for my big, comfortable bed and continuing to wear bikinis and thinking seriously about going to Georgia (the country) next year before my residency expires and I am stuck in Greece and bureaucratic hell again. Is this maturity? Honestly I don’t know.

But it’s pretty fun, in between all the tax forms and other paperwork. And I firmly believe that no matter how old we are, we’re allowed to prioritize joy and fun and trying out entirely new lives, if we want to.

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four years of living full-time in Greece

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May 22

Four years ago today I walked out of the offices of the Greek Ministry of Migration into a hot spring morning, clutching a blue paper with an enormous official seal on it saying I could now stay legally in Greece for as long as it took to approve my residency permit.

how I became a writer and moved to Greece

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Mar 13

“So what do you do for work here?” I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been asked this question, mostly by curious Greeks but also often by fellow Americans who wonder how I can make a living here.