The Village is Gone, and I'm Barely Hanging On

Today I was supposed to write you all a jolly KALO MINA round up of all of my favourite things. I can only write from the heart though, and what’s in my heart right now is the train of thought you’re all going to get. Happy you’re here with me but please do scroll down for some links to my favourite recipes to make this time of year if you’re not up for a love / sob story and essay on the woes of losing an entire generation of brilliant care givers.

I did promise myself that when I became a mother, I wouldn’t write about my children or become a ‘mommy influencer’ who posts their kids online and talks only about mothering. I think I have done a damn fine job of that but recently, about all I do is mothering and as the adage goes, we must all write what we know.

My man is a sailor. When I first met him, this was an exotic and exciting attribute. I had my coffee grounds read about a year before meeting him when I was with my ex boyfriend. Kyria Agkelina, an eighty something year old wise woman of the village just along from mine in Corfu was famous for reading the future in coffee grounds and I couldn’t pass up a chance of having her read mine. She predicted that my man would “come to me on water”. He wouldn’t be “from here” (meaning Corfu) but not from far away either. This sounds vague, I know. But the main message was that I wouldn’t be with the current boyfriend and that the man I was destined for would arrive via the sea.

Lo and behold one year later, Edoardo is doing a season on the yacht in Greece and we meet in a wine bar in Athens on his night off. Imagine my excitement when the hot, tall Italian told me he was captain of a sailing yacht? The rest, as they say, is history and now we’re married with two littles ones.

I do remember on the night that we met - very distinctly despite the copious amount of Assyrtiko I had been guzzling - that he told me this would be his last season on the boat and that he was looking for land based work because “I can’t have a family and do this job.”

Seven years later, he’s away in the Cycladic islands and barely reachable some times and I am on the other side of Greece, solo parenting a three year old and a baby. Last week my eight month old had a fever and we ended up in hospital. I was left making decisions alone that I should be making with my partner.

The reason I’m solo parenting is because times have changed since I was a little girl in the nineties. When my parents worked seasonal jobs throughout the summer (my dad actually used to dance at tavernas, would you believe) I was left in the capable, work wisened hands of Yiayia and Pappou. They were strict, not particularly emotionally available and plied me with chocolate and ice cream. It was both good and bad. Now I see very clearly that for my parents, Yiayia and Pappou were a lifeline.

My own parents live in England and despite being young and very much able, they don’t actually help with my children. On one occasion I left my eldest with my parents for five days. This was at the end of a three month stint in which I was alone with Calypso in my village on Corfu and completely isolated from friends and community in Athens. I flew to meet Edo and sail the boat back with him to Corfu from Italy when my parents finally came out to Corfu. This would be our one summer holiday and en route to the airport as my dad was dropping me off, he said “Your mum and me won’t get a holiday this year, because we’re looking after your child.”

This coming from a man who had his parents on hand to look after me for five months every year. Five days apparently is too much to ask of someone who doesn’t see his grandchildren for the other 360 days of the year.

I won’t go into details on my mother’s lack of qualifications for caring for my children but I will say that last year, when she was in Corfu to “help” me, she expected me to go to the supermarket and do a supermarket shop for her alone, whilst I was 8 months pregnant with my little one. I was lugging multiple 6 packs of water and heavy bags in my final trimester and my baby ended up breech and underweight.

I’m so grateful for the ‘help’ I received last year that I didn’t bother to ask them this time around. Conversely, my man’s father and his wife do come and help when they can but they’re twenty years older than my parents and still can’t replace Edo. We tried leaving the baby in their room last night because I haven’t managed more than four hours of sleep (TOTAL) a night for two weeks now. It was a disaster. The baby woke at 11pm, they freaked out, turned on all the lights and brought her straight up to me.

My health has deteriorated in the four years since having Calypso - in that I now have a chronic inflammatory condition that becomes worsened with stress and exhaustion. I am essentially always in pain and tired at the moment.

So, while grandparents exist on both sides of our family, I am still not able to feel as though I am able to mother and work to the best of my ability. Even when Edoardo is home, I am constantly torn between giving attention to both of my children. How can I possibly squeeze in time for my actual career?

I’m aware I’m on a bit of a ramble here because I’m sleep deprived but I’m getting to something, I promise. As you all know, I am obsessed with my Yiayia. Mediterranean grandmothers are the glue that keep our families together and most of my friends here in Greece were raised with or by their own. School run? Yiayia. Lunch? Yiayia. Dinner and bed? Yiayia.

Obviously globalisation and my desire to get as far away from my parents as possible probably doesn’t help the fact that help is no longer readily on hand. Edoardo’s parents are in Italy and mine are in the UK. Many of us no longer live in the same country as our parents, let alone the same town or village.

Anecdotally though, the friends who do live close to their parents seem to foster the same frustrations. A global survey of over 17,000 parents across 42 countries found higher rates of burnout in western cultures where nuclear families are isolated to just one or two parent carers. American psychiatrist Bruce Perry hit the nail on the head when he said that at no other point in human history have we been so alone in raising children. He says that during tribal living (most of the history of Homo Sapiens), families structured like my current model would never have survived. Hence my feeling like an ACTUAL ZOMBIE today and most days.