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Olga Thompson has over 350k followers on social media thanks to her hugely clickable clips parodying life as a menopausal mother of three teenage sons.
Known online as The Big Fat Greek Mother, her fans include Hollywood actress Naomi Watts and Jools Oliver; who, as a mother-of-five, regularly sends her message of solidarity.
However, there was a period in Olga’s life that she refers to as ‘the lost years’. Drowning in a swamp of pregnancy, postnatal depression and debilitating health anxiety, for a long time she felt like she had totally vanished.
‘The postnatal depression didn’t go away and about eight years of my life just disappeared. I was lost in a fog of all-consuming parenting,’ the comedian and content creator tells Metro over Zoom from her Hertfordshire home. ‘The boys were fine. I kept them alive, I kept myself alive. But my mind was checked out. Not many people knew, because I made sure I looked okay,’
Before becoming a mother 19 years ago, Olga, now 50, acted and performed the occasional standup, but the arrival of three sons – Harrison, 19, Marcus, 17 and Pearce, 15 – ‘ransacked’ her life and she dragged herself through the days until, aged 35 and pregnant with her third son, she was hit by a sudden and catastrophic dread of imminent death.
‘I had these obsessive, intrusive thoughts. Every time the baby moved, I would think I was going to die. And then when I had my son, it got worse,’ she remembers. ‘I’d be trying to breastfeed him, and checking my breasts to see if there was a lump. If I was out, I’d have to rush to the toilet to check that a new lump hadn’t developed. I feel ashamed to say it now when I think about people that actually are ill, but it was horrific.
‘If I heard about somebody that was dying, then I would think whatever they had was happening to me, and it was just overwhelming. I was drowning in my thoughts. I couldn’t eat or sleep, I just totally lost myself. We talk about postnatal depression, like it’s a thing like Tupperware or a procedure, but the term doesn’t really explain the horror story that it is.’
Crying in the shower where she knew her kids couldn’t find her, Olga struggled through the palpitations, breathlessness and panic attacks until one day aged 36, she had a breakdown in Morrisons.
‘I just came outside of myself, and I thought: “Oh. I’m not very well.” I put my basket down and came home. When I saw my husband it was like we’d won the lottery and I excitedly told him: “Paul, it’s because I’m not very well!” Poor guy, he’s been through so much with me,’ she admits.
Olga gave herself permission to collapse and took support from every avenue; her family, her church, her doctor and with the help of therapy and medication, spent years recovering.
‘I thought I would never come out of it but you suddenly find yourself one day with your sons in the garden, running around and they are much older and you’re like: “Where did the years go?” I love the time that I have with them now.’
Fully recovered, and with the dark days behind her, Olga started to think about her career, and in 2015 began filming comedy sketches and writing songs about parenting and posting them online.
‘With young children, I couldn’t get out to perform, so social media was my stage. Instagram provided women like myself an opportunity to do what we wanted to do while juggling the demands of childcare. We didn’t have to go anywhere to put on a show. We could do it in our living room,’ she explains.
It was a joyous success and five years later Olga’s Big Fat Greek Mother posts became a hit. She has since amassed hundreds of thousands of followers across Facebook, Insta and TikTok, as she laments the travails of a harassed middle aged mother constantly doling out chunks of protein and wads of cash to her sons while juggling the challenges of ‘keeping the tits off the floor while plucking stray chin hairs’.
However, Olga admits that the ghosts of her past still haunt her, and she has to work hard to stay well. Especially as spending much of her life online comes with its own set of unique challenges.
The pithy, shiny videos that we consume in seconds take hours for her to create and edit, and then there are the endless meetings and negotiations that creators need to go through to earn a crust.
Olga has tricks to protect herself, such as weekly quasi-staff meetings with cake and coffee with other content creators in her area.
‘We have to do this because we have no HR. It’s like the wild west online. It’s just unhinged,’ Olga explains. ‘Social media can be brutal – especially if you are perimenopausal and finding your place to belong. I don’t know any job where you’re constantly being yay or nayed every second of the day. People comment immediately on anything you post. If you’re working in an office, you don’t have someone every second of the day telling you how crap you are at something or how good your work is.
‘I don’t think we were made to have hundreds of thousands of people’s comments about everything that we do, but yet, this is where we work. It’s tough.’
And then there’s the misogyny and online hate. With daily criticism and abuse, Olga has to take care not to feed the trolls. ‘I’ve had: “She looks like a dog”. “If she was my wife, I would f* someone else”. And you get sworn at a lot. In the beginning, it used to destroy me. But it doesn’t bother me anymore. Now I get a lot of satisfaction from looking at their profiles. So many of them look like a lizard’s arsehole wearing a bandana,’ she laughs.
Over the past ten years Olga’s toolkit to protect her wellbeing includes not checking her phone first thing in the morning, setting up apps that stop her doom scrolling and ensuring she spends time working IRL to prevent total soul death.
‘I have to watch myself. If I am online too much, it can cause me to spiral. So every morning I know I have to get up, say my prayers, go for a run or get to the gym. I know the warning signs. I can feel them in my body, so I don’t wait,’ she explains.
Despite the horrors she endures online, the content creator insists she loves her job and the opportunities social media has given her. She spends hours each day engaging with people and replying to messages from her ‘lovely community of like minded women’.
Fortunately for Olga, her life on stage and in writing keeps her sane; she says she wouldn’t be able to cope with being solely online. And, thankfully, her sons and husband love her work. ‘They are always supportive and so proud of me. Apart from maybe when I am filming a dance in Nando’s,’ she adds with a smile.
‘They say I am not like other mums. If they asked me to stop, I would do so straight away. Being online has given me a lot of joy and a lot of opportunity. If it was that bad – I wouldn’t be on it. It’s fun.’
As much as she ridicules her children – being a mum to three teen boys is her defining glory, says Olga.
‘I’m enjoying my sons so much more now than I ever did. It’s so fun. I love being a mother of teenagers. My mind is really happy, wandering around B&M looking at bin liners and miniature glass owls.
‘I’m okay and nothing can scare me anymore,’ she says, then adds, ‘apart from some of the people I do see in B&M. They can be a little scary.’
● Olga’s book about her life, Split Ends: And New Beginnings, is out now.
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English (United States) ·