Omira Gill :
The rollercoaster of the Greek elections continues. Three weeks ago, I was putting in many long hours and late evenings shoe-horning in coverage of the Greek elections into my usual routine, two small kids hanging off my legs, my older son angrily commanding repeatedly “Mama stop working!”
Instead of easing up, things have actually got busier after the elections. I am now permanently engaged, the news running in the background as I cook dinner, wiping runny noses with one hand and updating my twitter feed with the other, getting up at ungodly hours after sleepless nights to file reports and wondering how much longer I can sustain this pace. “Do you remember the last time you got paid and it was enough money? You didn’t have to drain your account immediately to pay a stack of bills and taxes?” I was asking a friend last week. She couldn’t remember. I barely can. I can barely recall any more what it felt like to just know there was money in the bank.
This is what living in this economic crisis is like. We think about money all the time, the way someone in a famine must think about food. Money, money, money. It gets boring, and it gets tiring.
Days before the election, I was chatting to another journalist who had flown in to cover the events in Greece. He asked me why I had stuck around in Greece despite having an open door to exit to the UK any time I wanted.
I tried to answer as honestly as I could. It’s hard to pick out a particularly bad point in the crisis – all of it has been bad – but 2012 was the year when the thought seriously crossed my mind that we would have to leave Greece.
Strangely, it wasn’t to do with the crisis. As the country’s economy collapsed around us, me and my family were going through a much more awful personal crisis of our own. My son had just been diagnosed with an incurable and life-limiting condition, and I was frantic in my grief.
Stuck down the rabbit hole of the terrible reality I now found myself in, one where I had lost nearly all control over my son’s health, the crisis around me more or less passed me by. I don’t remember much of that year. My traumatised mind smudged over everything, good and bad, like a hand swept across a chalk drawing.
One evening, days after diagnosis, we were watching a sci-fi movie when I turned to my husband and said “Do you think aliens might have the cure for this? Maybe there’s a way we can get a message to them.” That’s what grief does, it sends you half crazy, because I wasn’t joking.
On the 14th of May 2012, I made a phonecall I was dreading. Never have I not wanted to make a phonecall more than this one. The lab that had given us the diagnosis one week earlier had immediately sent me for testing to see if I was a silent carrier of Duchenne’s broken gene and had inadvertently passed it to my son.
The phone rang and the lab assistant I was by now on first name terms with picked up. I heard her place the phone down as she went to find my results. Moments later, she was back, breathless.
“It’s good news! You’re not a carrier.” she told me. I could hear the relief in her voice. I thanked her and hung up, staring at the little piece of paper with the lab’s number, under which I wrote ‘NOT a carrier’ just to be sure. It was my birthday. I turned 30 that day. Happy birthday to me.
We wondered into 2012 and 2013 whether it was time to call it quits. Around us, the net was tightening. My first son was conceived under the shadow of an economic crisis, but at that point we were both employed in good jobs.
What should have been the happy news of my second pregnancy was quickly followed by a redundancy for my husband, and a while later, for me. When the fog of my depression lifted, I realised we were sailing in very choppy waters. But here we still are. We’re still here in Athens, picking our way to the ruins of this crisis along with millions of others.
Life doesn’t always work out the way we want. People let us down. So do places. But perhaps there’s a lesson in there. Almost nothing in life can be handed back to start again when it’s not worked out the way you planned. Not my first born son, and neither the country I’m living in.
We have to hold on and just keep on going.
(Omaira Gill is a freelance journalist based in Athens)
The rollercoaster of the Greek elections continues. Three weeks ago, I was putting in many long hours and late evenings shoe-horning in coverage of the Greek elections into my usual routine, two small kids hanging off my legs, my older son angrily commanding repeatedly “Mama stop working!”
Instead of easing up, things have actually got busier after the elections. I am now permanently engaged, the news running in the background as I cook dinner, wiping runny noses with one hand and updating my twitter feed with the other, getting up at ungodly hours after sleepless nights to file reports and wondering how much longer I can sustain this pace. “Do you remember the last time you got paid and it was enough money? You didn’t have to drain your account immediately to pay a stack of bills and taxes?” I was asking a friend last week. She couldn’t remember. I barely can. I can barely recall any more what it felt like to just know there was money in the bank.
This is what living in this economic crisis is like. We think about money all the time, the way someone in a famine must think about food. Money, money, money. It gets boring, and it gets tiring.
Days before the election, I was chatting to another journalist who had flown in to cover the events in Greece. He asked me why I had stuck around in Greece despite having an open door to exit to the UK any time I wanted.
I tried to answer as honestly as I could. It’s hard to pick out a particularly bad point in the crisis – all of it has been bad – but 2012 was the year when the thought seriously crossed my mind that we would have to leave Greece.
Strangely, it wasn’t to do with the crisis. As the country’s economy collapsed around us, me and my family were going through a much more awful personal crisis of our own. My son had just been diagnosed with an incurable and life-limiting condition, and I was frantic in my grief.
Stuck down the rabbit hole of the terrible reality I now found myself in, one where I had lost nearly all control over my son’s health, the crisis around me more or less passed me by. I don’t remember much of that year. My traumatised mind smudged over everything, good and bad, like a hand swept across a chalk drawing.
One evening, days after diagnosis, we were watching a sci-fi movie when I turned to my husband and said “Do you think aliens might have the cure for this? Maybe there’s a way we can get a message to them.” That’s what grief does, it sends you half crazy, because I wasn’t joking.
On the 14th of May 2012, I made a phonecall I was dreading. Never have I not wanted to make a phonecall more than this one. The lab that had given us the diagnosis one week earlier had immediately sent me for testing to see if I was a silent carrier of Duchenne’s broken gene and had inadvertently passed it to my son.
The phone rang and the lab assistant I was by now on first name terms with picked up. I heard her place the phone down as she went to find my results. Moments later, she was back, breathless.
“It’s good news! You’re not a carrier.” she told me. I could hear the relief in her voice. I thanked her and hung up, staring at the little piece of paper with the lab’s number, under which I wrote ‘NOT a carrier’ just to be sure. It was my birthday. I turned 30 that day. Happy birthday to me.
We wondered into 2012 and 2013 whether it was time to call it quits. Around us, the net was tightening. My first son was conceived under the shadow of an economic crisis, but at that point we were both employed in good jobs.
What should have been the happy news of my second pregnancy was quickly followed by a redundancy for my husband, and a while later, for me. When the fog of my depression lifted, I realised we were sailing in very choppy waters. But here we still are. We’re still here in Athens, picking our way to the ruins of this crisis along with millions of others.
Life doesn’t always work out the way we want. People let us down. So do places. But perhaps there’s a lesson in there. Almost nothing in life can be handed back to start again when it’s not worked out the way you planned. Not my first born son, and neither the country I’m living in.
We have to hold on and just keep on going.
(Omaira Gill is a freelance journalist based in Athens)
