Mother’s Day Reflections

Everybody has a story. Big, small, complex, simple, multi-layered. Stories mingled with other people’s stories. Happy stories, sad stories, amazing stories. And they are all amazing, even the most ordinary person will have a story that is utterly unique.

I was thinking about this today as I chatted with people at my café here on the island, on Mother’s Day. It came up in conversation, and my answer was: everyone has a story. You sit next to someone, you pass by someone, and you have no idea what their story is. You cannot dismiss them at a glance, thinking this is an ordinary person, an average person, or someone whose appearance boxes them into a certain predictable stereotype.

If a tourist had passed through my ancestral village and seen my grandmother sitting under a tree, dressed in the black clothes she had worn since she was widowed in her forties, they might have thought that here is a typical Cretan woman who lived her whole life on this island. A traditional woman, a Mediterranean woman, who — given her age, born at the beginning of last century, given the wars and the Nazi occupations — was most likely illiterate. That could have been the obvious story.

And of course there were extraordinary chapters within it. Having a family in the middle of the war. Trying to survive. Her husband, my grandfather, involved in the local resistance, helping Allied forces escape Crete after the Battle of Crete, and then harbouring soldiers and spies at great personal risk. I remember once she mentioned that she had a guide. I asked what she meant, and she alluded to some kind of guardian, she called her a guide, who warned her once during the Nazi occupation that her husband needed to come home and sleep in the house that night, or there would be consequences. Because of this guide, she was able to protect him. And perhaps the rest of her family too — she had teenage sons during the war.

That could have been my grandmother’s story, the extraordinary life shaped by history and circumstance, the woman widowed in her forties, left with many young children to fend for in post-war devastated Crete. A story that would have elevated her to heroine. And it would have been a valid story.

But that was not, I feel, my grandmother’s defining story.

Her defining story was one of bravery at a different critical moment, when she herself was a teenager. An orphan, because her mother had died when she was a toddler. Her father’s family arranged for her to be married off, apparently everything was settled, there was even an engagement celebration. But my grandmother, fourteen years old, did not want to get married. Not to this man, not then.

So she thought hard about how to escape, which was entirely unthinkable for her time and place. She went along with it. She planned carefully. She sat beside this man. She endured the engagement party. And that night, the night she was meant to consummate the relationship — because that is how it worked: once that happened, you were his, and any other path would bring shame — she said quietly that she needed to go to the bathroom.

She left her slippers in the room so no one would suspect anything. She walked to the bathroom, closed the door, locked it, opened the tiny window, and left. Escaped. Climbed through that small window and walked out into the middle of the night, through fields, without shoes, a fourteen-year-old girl making her way toward the village where her mother’s relatives lived, hoping they would offer her sanctuary.

And that is what she did. By the time the other party understood what had happened, it was too late. Her mother’s family protected her.

My grandmother’s name was Eleftheria which means freedom, an apt name you might think that reflected her indomitable spirit. She was also the woman that brought me up in my very formative years. I called mama and she taught me to be me.

Eventually, my grandmother married my grandfather, by all accounts an honourable man, generous to a fault, a man of kind disposition. That generosity showed itself during the war, when he would take whatever cheese they had made and whatever bread my grandmother had baked for their eight children and give it to the foreign soldiers who had fought for his island’s freedom, putting his own family at risk. My grandmother, despite her complaints about this, found in him a man she could live with, someone whose values she respected. They had a good marriage, despite everything.

He died prematurely of cancer, leaving her in her forties with several young children, some as young as three, some five, seven, ten. My mother was perhaps thirteen. And my grandmother continued, with a kind of heroic steadiness, to protect her children and create opportunities for them, so they would not go without.

That is the story, I think, that tells you who my grandmother truly was. Because we each have so many stories, but sometimes all of them are tied back to one — one that shows, most clearly, who we truly are.

And as I thought about my grandmother, I thought of her mother, my great-grandmother Eugenia.

My great-grandmother’s story was another defining one. A widow herself, a woman of high standing in her community, the daughter of a priest, wealthy. She attracted the attention of my great-grandfather, who was, by all accounts an opportunist, a man looking for a woman with means who might not feel she could afford to refuse. Since she was a widow, he calculated she had limited choices. But apparently she did not want to remarry. What happened after that is told only in rumours, that he forced himself upon her. And so that is how my great-grandmother came to marry my great-grandfather.

She had my grandmother, and a younger daughter. But she died young when my grandmother was two or three years old, her sister even younger. That was the story that defined the end of her life. And in a way, it also defined my grandmother’s, because out of that experience — out of what was perhaps passed to her without words, in the very fact of her mother’s fate — she drew her determination. She was going to control her own story, to the greatest extent possible. She was not going to let it happen again.

In this way, my great-grandmother’s defining story seeded my grandmother’s. And my grandmother’s story, in turn, defined my mother’s. A woman who learned that when an opportunity comes, no matter how improbable or impossible it seems, if it is the story meant for you, you grab it and you make something of it. And that is what she did when the elders in her community and the local doctors chose to train her as a nurse; a doorway that opened everything, that allowed her to overcome post-war poverty, orphanhood, the limited schooling she had managed, the narrow options she had been handed. She knew that when opportunity comes, you take it. You do not resign yourself to what life has simply thrown at you.

And so I come from that lineage. A lineage of women whose defining stories created a pathway for the next woman, and the woman after, and the daughter after her. We are the sum total of all of that.

My great-grandmother’s moment, her resignation, however involuntary, to a fate she had not chosen, dropped a seed of resilience and courage into her daughter’s life. A daughter she did not live to know.

And so what does that say about me?

How do I honour these women who came before me?

How do I honour their stories?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

(Photo: my grandmother holding my mother in her arms, just before the WWII started)