Member-only story
About Me — Eleni Stephanides
Brought to you by a gay Millennial from a swinging chair with cats
I grew up in Piedmont, a small town tucked inside Oakland, California. My dad worked as an inpatient pharmacist, and my mom spent four decades as a psychiatric nurse and later a foster care nurse. I’m the younger of two, with a sister three and a half years older.
We weren’t a typical American family. My dad was born in Polis, a seaside village in Cyprus with a population of about 1,500. At sixteen, he left on his own and moved to the United States without his parents.
Some of my fondest childhood memories are of family trips to my dad’s island. After long mornings by the Mediterranean, we’d come back to my Yiaya’s house with shells in our pockets, eager for her irresistible Greek cooking.
My mom, by contrast, was a Bay Area local. She grew up in a working-class family in Pittsburg, California. Her mother was from Dresden, a city devastated by World War II, and her father was a soldier from Minnesota who had been stationed in Germany. They met in Berlin, where my grandma worked as a secretary for the Allied Forces.
Both my parents sparked my love for reading and writing at an early age. When I was four, overflowing with stories but unable to spell or write them down, my dad patiently…
