About A Girl: Identity Matters

On raising daughters, breaking boxes, and belonging everywhere and nowhere all at once.

What Are You Having?

“What are you having?”

It took me about six months to realize people weren’t asking about my lunch—they were inquiring about the sex of the child I was carrying. And most of you reading this might have asked the same. Not out of malice or nosiness, but because we’re conditioned to place people—especially babies—into neat, recognizable categories. Boy or girl. Pink or blue. Trucks or tiaras.

We ask because we want to know which aisle to shop in. But more than that, we ask because we have an inherent need to classify, identify, and locate someone within a social order. Identity—just eight letters—holds the weight of our sense of self, our belonging, our permission to act or to dream. It defines who we believe we are, and who others think we should be.

Naming and Being Named

Even before birth, identity starts to take shape.

“She’s a girl,” people exclaim. “Girls are easier.”

“Did you want a boy?”

“Will she be German, Greek, Cypriot, or Canadian?”

Already, assumptions fill the air. That she’ll be easier to dress. That she’ll be gentler, softer. That we’ll raise her with one national identity—or all of them. But what does that even mean for someone who hasn’t yet taken her first breath?

This child of mine is already placed into frameworks and expectations shaped by generations, ideologies, and geographies. And that is exactly where this reflection begins—at the intersection of culture, memory, and becoming.

From Athens to Accra

I was born in Athens to Greek Cypriot parents—parents whose lives were shaped by the consequences of war. From Greece to Iraq and then to Dominican Republic, to Canada, and eventually to Ghana, my early years were defined by movement, adaptation, and migration.

My mother, a teacher from Nicosia (inside the walls not outside-more on that in another post), tells the story of standing in front of Niagara Falls in Canada, holding me arm, crying. She wondered what she was doing in this foreign country with so much snow.

In Ghana, I attended international schools and was exposed to a rich mosaic of cultures, religions, languages, and identities. Summers were spent on the island of Cyprus at the village with my grandparents, like all good diaspora children do. When we returned to Canada for good, I was fifteen—and it was there I began to understand identity not only as culture or nationality, but as race, gender, and class.

Lessons in Belonging

As a teenager, I struggled to find foundation for my olive skin—burnished gold by the African sun. Everything was too pink or too orange. In this land of celebrated multiculturalism, I realized even makeup had borders.

The question followed me everywhere:

“Where are you from?”

“You lived in Africa?”

“You don’t have an accent.”

If I said Cyprus, people didn’t know where it was. But I’d never really lived there. If I said Ghana, they responded, “But you’re not Black.” If I said Canada, it was followed by “But originally?”

Eventually, I discovered a term that described my experience: third culture kid—someone who spends their formative years in a culture different from their parents’. It fit. Sort of.

Academic Anchors

This quest for meaning led me into social anthropology, then sociology, and later into social justice education. I joined the African Studies Association, the Hellenic Students Association—often getting side-eyes for not sticking to one. I read postcolonial theory, transnational feminist work, and cultural studies texts that gave language to what I had always felt but couldn’t name.

The world wanted to place me in categories: immigrant, white (no, wait—too much of a tan), woman, Canadian, Cypriot, Greek, heteronormative, Orthodox, single, divorced, now remarried. And yet none of these felt complete.

I return often to the words of Professor Dan Yon in Elusive Culture, where a student named Margaret once said:

“At one point I thought of myself as a Black person and that limits me because as a Black person there are things that I am supposed to be. So I had to shed that. I am not just Black. I am a woman, and that limits me as well. [But,] if I think that I am limited then I don't dare risk anything or try to do anything. So ‘bust’ being Black and ‘bust’ being a woman.”

Her words echoed in me. So “bust” being a third culture kid. “Bust” being an expat, a wife, a mother, a label. Who gets to decide?

Returning Home, Making Home

I’ve planted roots in Cyprus (for now)—my parents’ homeland. My current research and writing explore how women on this island work toward peace and reconciliation, resisting essentialist and heteronormative ways of peacemaking. It’s personal. Political. A homecoming of sorts.

But even here, identity isn’t a fixed destination. It’s still in motion—still shaped by how I’m seen and how I choose to see myself. I often obeserve family members, friends born and raised in Cyprus who so seemlessly without any discomfort move with an effortless ebb and flow. I watch with wonder at what it would feel like to do so- seemlessly.

Now, as a mother raising a multicultural child, identity feels even more urgent and more complex. It’s not just about who I am—but about the kind of space I want to create for my daughter. What does it mean to be a girl, raised by a feminist, diasporic mother in an ever-polarizing world? What will she accept, and what will she resist?

Identity as Process

Too often, we understand identity as something we are. But what if it’s something we do? Something we make and unmake, over and over again?

Identity isn’t one story. It’s layered, messy, unresolved. It is, as the scholars say, socially constructed—but also deeply felt. It’s how we find belonging, even if only in fragments.

As I navigate motherhood, marriage (again x2), and a career in the humanitarian world, I feel the pull of those boxes: wife, mother, professional and at times with discomfort.

I also feel the responsibility to resist what no longer fits—and to model that resistance for my daughter.

This talk, this essay, is for her. A love letter. A guidepost. A reminder that identity is never final—it’s a fluid, evolving process. And that she, too, gets to decide who she will be.