My mom was not a nice person. I never knew who I was going to get. But I learned a few invaluable things from her.
My mother was rude, angry, irritable, judgmental and ill-tempered; she was neither compassionate nor understanding. We fought quite a bit. I’d cry to friends about how I was treated, and they couldn’t understand why she was the way she was. I knew, and I tried to explain.
When Calley Akouris died from two massive strokes on May 22 at age 90, she finally put a lifetime of hell behind her.
She saw uncles and cousins executed by the Nazis during the German occupation of Greece from 1941 to 1944. She also survived the Greek civil war that went on during World War II. She often spoke of seeing waves of gray uniforms sweep across the mountains of the Peloponnese region where she grew up. It was the Germans, and they gave her nightmares well into adulthood.
“I could see them in the living room,” she’d tell me when I was young. “They were holding guns, and they were standing right over me.” My mom was only 8 when the Germans came into her village “and you knew they meant business,” she said.
Most of the men in my mother’s family were Greek soldiers or police officers. She said the Germans rounded up the men in her village and shot them, mostly for no reason. She described the execution of one uncle while he stood against a tree. For weeks afterward, she said, his brain matter remained on the bark.
Maybe it was this pent-up anger that led her a few years later to mouth off to a rebel soldier during the civil war without knowing if the soldier was a Communist or a Socialist. My mom was out with an uncle on horseback when the rebel soldier appeared. He asked for their papers. She refused. He asked again. She refused again.
“Keep your mouth shut,” the uncle said, “or we’re both dead.”
She didn’t relent, and, in what can only be described as a miracle, the soldier let them both go.
These horrors shaped the person she became. It is clear to me now that she had post-traumatic stress disorder. She even hinted at that when I was a teenager. We were at a local library, and she asked me to help her “find a book so I can figure out why I am the way I am.” We didn’t find a book about PTSD, and she never got therapy.
Calley Akouris and cousin John in March 1951 at the Parthenon the day she sailed out of Greece for the United States. (Family photo)
There were other experiences that likely contributed to my mother’s mood swings and anger. She was the eldest of three children, and my grandfather told her that she had to leave Greece to live with relatives she didn’t know in a country where she didn’t understand the language. The plan most likely was for her to go to the United States first and send for her brother, sister and parents in due time.
She was 17 when she got on a boat with a group of teenagers from her village. Once she got to Lebanon, New Hampshire, she was basically by herself. She lived with her paternal grandparents, who set her up with a factory job but made sure to take half her paycheck for room and board each week.
My mom, a dressmaker, left New Hampshire for better work in Lowell, Massachusetts, before coming to Chicago and working at Marshall Field’s in the alterations department. She stayed there for 18 years.
It was in Chicago where my mom became a citizen in 1956, taking the oath on her lunch break. “When I left the courthouse, I felt so free! I was so happy! It was like my feet weren’t even touching the ground when I went back to work.” She did bring her brother, Lou, here and then her mother, Demetria. But her father, Nicholas, and sister Helen died in Greece from illness.
As a child, I never knew what was going to happen when I woke up in the morning. Would I get the nice mom? Or would I get the angry mom who lashed out for no logical reason?
I couldn’t do a lot of things that my friends did, the normal childhood stuff. You see, my mom didn’t have a childhood. She stopped going to school during the occupation because the teachers, all men, went off to war. She couldn’t understand why I wanted to just get out of the house and play and be with kids my own age.
But she did teach me a few things.
Tina Akouris' mother, Calley, shows her grandson Nicholas how to sew a button on a coat in 2017. (Family photo)
I learned to be a better mother, giving my sons the childhood I didn’t have and breaking the cycle of generational abuse that is so easy to fall into. My sons don’t have to wonder if they’re going to get Angry Mom or Normal Mom in the morning.
When my experiences became intolerable — crippling anxiety that prevented me from leaving the house and a battle with cancer — I knew that if my mom came out of two wars alive, then I could overcome pretty much anything.
In my mom’s last hours, as she lay unconscious in a west suburban hospital, I talked to her at her bedside. I told her I felt like she never liked me. I asked her what I did that made her so angry.
Then I told her I loved her.
And then I told her I forgave her.
Tina E. Akouris is an editor on the Tribune’s audience team.
Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email letters@chicagotribune.com.
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Andrew Mitrovica
Belen Fernandez
Marwan Bishara
Timotej Milanov
Tafi Mhaka
Grant Arthur Gochin
Ahmadi Ali
visit website
