Growing up Greek in Australia in the 80’s was fantastic. Sorry, this isn’t going to be an article about racism or hard times, nor will it be about my parents escaping any horrific hardships, it’s about me making fun of my childhood. At the ripe age of 35, having cast my net across a diverse range of friends in my life, I can now look back at my childhood and honestly say it was “different” and “sheltered”, to say the least.

My parents were born and raised in a village in Greece called Tsaritsani, you wouldn’t know it unless you weren’t from around there, it takes multiple zooms on Google maps to see it, just outside of Elassona, up North in Thessaly. Yes typically, they both came here with a suitcase each and worked blue collar jobs, my mum in a shirt factory and my dad for Vline trains, and yes, they did what most immigrant Greeks did and they worked hard, bought a house, worked harder, paid it off, bought another, paid it off, repeat, repeat. These days my generation struggle to even save the 20 per cent deposit in order to get a loan to buy a house, which then takes us 30 years to pay off and our parents were paying off entire houses in a few years. It all came at a price though, but most people we knew were in the same boat… and I don’t mean the boat from Greece.

The price we paid growing up Greek was definitely not a price we would ever make our children pay now. Being frugal meant our weekends consisted of trips to relatives houses, not play centres and bowling, which entailed sitting in their kalo saloni (formal room) which was only used for special occasions like visitors and just in case the Queen ever popped over. You were to sit on that couch and NOT MOVE as you eyed off the plate of kourabiethes (shortbread biscuits with icing), salivating because you wanted another one but all along receiving death stares from your dad for even THINKING about asking for another one. They, like everything else in your relatives house, was forbidden, completely off bounds. Then, after a 3 hour long visit, your mother finally gave your father “the look” to get up and then he’d give her back the same look to indicate “no you get up first” and they would do this back and forth, so as not to be the rude one who stands up first to leave, and you think FINALLY we are leaving. They then begin the goodbye kisses, two cheeks each in the living room, then you walk to the front door all together and more kisses there and then the man of the house walks you out to the car as the rest of the family stands at the door and waves at you getting into the car, then keeps waving, until your car can no longer be seen in the far distance….anything before that is rude, which may result in some one being paraksenos (weirdly behaved) and you may never see that family again if farewell protocol isn’t followed.

Fun was being allowed to go out on our bikes for hours at a time, no mobile phones for us to be checked on, no worries in the world, yet going to a friends party was off limits. I think my entire childhood I went to 3 parties, sleep overs were NEVER going to happen. Looking back now I don’t know if those parties were even worth the psychological damage they did. My mother used to sew my outfits… yes that’s right. She would take me to Spotlight and i could pick the pattern/design I wanted and the rest was a surprise. Boy was it a surprise, when I just wanted to look like Blossom and I rocked up to my friends party wearing an ensemble my mum had made, which she thought was “gorgeous”. I will never forget this one particular outfit, it was MC Hammer pants and a bolero double breasted top with puffy shoulder sleeves, in red material with huge white polka dots, needless to say I was not to partake in Twister that day because it would be too confusing for the other kids.

School for my brother and I was a very serious matter. Even though they were scrimping and saving, private schooling was a priority as they wanted a better life for us than that they had. My father was never academic but my mother was a super nerd, her family only had enough money to send one of five kids to school, and being the middle child, and female, that was never going to be her. An “A” wasn’t acceptable to my parents, if it wasn’t an A+ I was to feel the wrath. They used to ground us for unreasonable amounts of time, like 3 months. Who grounds their child for 3 months? Ground from what you ask, seeing as I wasn’t allowed out of the house? I was grounded from television. I think that’s why I am so creative now. I used to sit in the doorway of the living room and listen to Home and Away, envisioning how Selena looked as she fought with Angel in the corridors of Summer Bay High over Dieter Brummer.

Growing up Greek you do not back-chat or misbehave, the consequences were too harsh. You also, as I learnt in my adult years, NEVER tell an Aussie friend what the extent of these consequences were, because they will look at you as though you had survived the hardships of war. Punishment as a Greek child, and i was quite a boisterous child, came in the form of “choose your punisher and weapon of choice”. You could choose mother, who had the “plasti” (a rolling pin which was more like a sawn off curtain rod. That distinct sound of it cutting through the air as it narrowly missed your butt as you ran away was that of a light sabre, one i will never forget). You could choose father, he had multiple weapons of choice, the belt, the “verya” (olive branch) or his hand if he had to. Yiayia (grandmother) had the pandofla (slipper) and pappou (grandfather) had the boomerang. Yes A BOOMERANG! how Australian of him, damn that trip to Vic market, bloody hurt! I became the master of hiding and climbing because of this, my brother however sat there and took it, he often took a few for the team too. If I ever heard “ZOE THA FAS KSULO” (Zoe you’re going to eat wood is the direct translation, but it means you’re going to get it), I bolted!

Looking back, I wouldn’t change a thing. If you asked me then though, or heard some of the conversations I had with myself in the mirror, you’d hear how much I wished I had Tina’s parents because they were so cool, or how I wished I had an exotic name like Sarah and Laura from down the road. Fact is though, we turned out alright, we turned out great actually. We are respectful of our elders, we studied hard, learnt the value of a dollar and we are athletic now, from all the running we did to avoid punishment. The most amazing thing about growing up Greek though, was the togetherness of the family unit, I don’t mean the times you did something wrong and would hear about it from your parents, uncles, grandparents and even a phone call from your grandmothers neighbour back in the village, I mean the love we felt from so many people. There was also a lot of cheek pinching and money slipping into your pockets when you saw relatives, that was so good, but if you have nothing else you will always have the stories to tell your children when they’re older..

Zoe George (nee Velonis) is the The Subtle Mummy. Visit www.thesubtlemummy.com and www.facebook.com/thesubtlemummy