Redux
Stories that circle and return
One of our moms, because my best friends’ mothers are also mine, in that very Cypriot way where kitchen is a public canteen, recipes circulate faster than scandals, and advice is dispensed whether you asked for it or not, has now entered a new episode, one written in plaster casts.
To be fair, we’ve also entered a new episode: Hot Flashes – Season Two. The teenage tension is back, only now we are the mothers, surrounded on one side by student-age teenagers navigating Cyprus’ notoriously unsafe roads, and on the other by “teenagers” born in the ’40s, who are just as convinced they know everything. And in Cyprus, mothers are asked to play superheroes. The state is absent when you are working and raising children, and equally absent when you are aging. We work hard, while pretending we have endless reserves of strength.
And yes, I like to believe I’m aging with the kind of humor (and bite) you only get after years in the barrel (more oak and fire than silk at this stage). But the joke came elsewhere. One of our moms managed to fall and break both arms, in that stubborn way you’d expect: “I don’t need help, I have balance.” Only the city pavement had the last laugh. Pavements in Cyprus are the joke everyone knows too well.
It should not be an extreme sport to walk down the street, but that is exactly what urban life has become. In Nicosia, where flats are now priced beyond the reach of most people and in Limassol, where towers rise higher every year. Safety-deposit boxes in the sky, while on the ground, the pavements are cracked, narrow, and often so poorly designed they are unusable. And our mom has tried, again and again, to tell the local authorities.
But in Cyprus, older voices rarely make it through the noise. At luxurious Ayios Tychonas, for instance, a “pavement” hardly a meter wide clings to the roadside. Dangerous and humiliating in the shadow of multi-million-euro towers. Meanwhile cars that look like tanks park across the pavements, forcing people into the street. It is probably the only country where the cars claim the pavement, and the road is left for pedestrians (!)
We often talk about how citizens here can “manage” anything. But mothers should not have to manage broken bones because of broken pavements. If we are to call ourselves a modern European country, then walking should be the simplest act of all: safe, ordinary, and free.
And now, we are left to deal with a mom-lion in a cage, unable to roll stuffed vine leaves or bake apple pie. Don't get me started on the drives to physiotherapy, the endless queues of the health system, and wading through the everpresent traffic to run a few errands. Sigh or scream? The ordeal of everyday life in Cyprus never seems to end.