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On the Wrong Side of the Ocean

by Magdalena Bartkowska

I was thirteen years old when I first broke my mother’s heart.

She was sitting at the kitchen table looking through the newspaper for coupons, after a day of scrubbing toilets and cleaning the houses of her American clients, after coming home to fry pork chops and boil potatoes and scoop out shredded beets from the jar with the Polish label on it. My father had already left for his night shift at the textile factory. The house was quiet— except for my pounding heart.

My only concern was that she would say “no.”

I wanted to move back to Poland. I knew it might be a hard sell—after all, our lives were much better on this side of the Atlantic. Our newly built house, although modest, was bigger than the one-bedroom apartment our family of four had shared back in Gdańsk. We now had two cars and a computer; best of all, a fenced-in backyard with a swimming pool in which I had finally learned how to swim. Also, I no longer had to stuff cotton balls into the toes of my shoes—my parents earned enough money now, and there was no need to buy footwear several sizes too big.

But after five years, I was ready to give it all up. Even the pool.

Of course, I’d heard my parents’ stories of what life was like before we moved to paradise. I knew about the food rations and the endless lines winding around shops like restless, hungry snakes, the people’s faces weary. I knew about the store shelves, empty but for a few bottles of vinegar stationed there like silent sentries. I’d heard about General Jaruzelski appearing on television on a cold Sunday morning one year before I was born, in his olive-green uniform, with his large balding forehead and thick glasses, to announce the imposition of martial law in the People’s Republic of Poland. Something about army tanks rolling through the streets and soldiers shooting protesters, something about disconnected phone lines and curfews—these details, too, had bounced up against my ears.

To me, they were fragments of an irrelevant past. They belonged in history books, alongside the other mundane details we copied from the blackboard in my Catholic school (although I never did learn about Polish history there). Did I think that my mother and father were exaggerating, being overly dramatic in the way that parents can sometimes be? Of course. It was kind of like when Mamusia constantly warned me about the dangers of drafty rooms or the terrible sicknesses that would befall me if I dared to venture outside with wet hair, but then nothing calamitous ever happened. Besides, all those stories they told? They resided in the previous decade. As far as I was concerned, that was a lifetime ago.

My memories of the country I’d left as a child were of Chinese jump rope and cream-filled wafer tubes, clover wreaths and the Baltic Sea on the distant horizon. Mamusia frying caramelized onions for supper. Mamusia reading to me on our couch.

Then, too, there was the summer I’d just spent with relatives in Poland, out in the country where the days were carefree and where everyone was curious about the Amerykanka. Where the milk tasted like milk and the stars were innumerable; where shimmering lakes winked at me in the sunlight and fields of barley rippled underneath Polish clouds, filling my heart with longing.

I wanted to live there again. In that familiar place where my name was recognized and not mauled; where family dropped by for coffee and cake and where everyone slept under a goose-feather-filled pierzyna. Where even the light switches and doors with their metal handles and frosted glass panels reminded me I was home. I wanted to live in this place that made sense. I wanted to live in a place I belonged.

It didn’t matter that I knew what Mamusia’s objections would be. That life in Poland was hard, that there weren’t enough jobs, that money was hard to come by.

All I knew in my young heart was this: I was on the wrong side of the ocean.

So without a thought for the woman who’d lived her whole life under Communist rule—who’d spent long chilly nights waiting in grocery queues; who’d raised her daughters alone for three years while her husband was paving the way in America; who’d packed up our lives and said goodbye to her sister, her brothers, and everyone else; who at forty learned English and the art of shaving her legs for the first time—without a thought for this woman, I walked into the kitchen and said,

“Mamuś, I want to move back to Poland.”

Her stunned eyes met mine. A coupon slowly swirled to the linoleum floor.

“Córeczko, but why?”

There were tears, explanations, deep sighs, lots of maybes. Maybe when Tatuś retires. Maybe when I graduate from college. Someday, maybe.

But someday was too distant. Couldn’t she understand the longing I had in my heart for Poland? So, I continued spending each summer there, rooting myself more firmly in the place I thought I belonged, dreaming of someday.

When I was fresh out of high school, I broke my mother’s heart once again.

This time my father suffered the blow, too. A compromise, I called it, which is silly, I realize now, as there was nothing about it they wanted. But what could they do? They drove me to the airport, saying few words on the way, but shedding plenty of tears as they fiercely hugged me goodbye at the security checkpoint.

Eight whole months. By deferring my college admission for a year, that was the time I’d negotiated to follow my dream.    

I rented an apartment above a grocery store in the center of a town called Brusy, where a cobblestone street slowed the cars passing through and a brick church with two spires kept watch over all. Stepping outside each morning, I tried to blend in with the people and pretend that I, too, had been there forever. I bought milk in black and white cartons and stopped at the kiosk for the paper. I took the bus to the village for coffee and cake with my family and, on Saturday nights, went out dancing with friends to the sounds of Stachursky and J.Lo.

But I couldn’t sew myself seamlessly back into the fabric of my homeland. People would ask me where I was from. Not wanting the label of Amerykanka, I would say Gdańsk. Why did it feel like a lie?

Maybe because I missed Mamusia’s apple and squash on the day that I knew was Thanksgiving. Maybe it was the hours I spent at the internet café in Chojnice, reading emails from friends on the other side of the ocean, writing back with plans for all the things we would do when I returned in the summer. None of the daydreams I’d had about living in Poland included this kind of heartache.

I flew back to New York, my inner compass a wreck, and looked out the window at the ocean below. I wondered if this was what being an immigrant really meant: to be split into two, always longing for home—although home was a concept that was constantly shifting. Home for an immigrant—a place out of reach far too often.

Could I ever feel like home was America?

It took a few more years, more visits to Poland, and more returns to this side of the ocean before I learned the elusive answer. These days, when the plane lands in Boston and I walk into the mix of people at Logan Airport, I know. When I gaze out the car whisking me west on the Masspike and see the familiar sights, I know. The yellow school buses and flashy billboards, the red barns, I know. The New England houses, with their clapboard siding and evergreen shrubs, their tiger lilies in bloom, I know. White-steepled churches on tranquil town greens and the stars and stripes waving in the hot, humid breeze, I know. Although I will always love and miss Poland, these things are a part of me now. This is my home.

And my mother? She is strong. Although I’d break her heart again a few more times through the years, in the way that daughters can sometimes unflinchingly do, she forgave me each time—in the way that mothers can sometimes so gracefully do. She’s still here, bringing me bags of frozen pierogi and watching my children when I need a reprieve, or cooking bigos for parties at which she’ll pour my American friends shots of vodka and at which her voice will be the loudest one singing, “Sto Lat.”       

Now, almost thirty years after leaving Poland behind, when she still questions the decision of uprooting our family, I tell her,

“Mamuś, you did the right thing. I’m so grateful.”

I know it doesn’t make up for the heartbreak. But it’s something.

And who knows? Maybe there’s no such thing as the wrong side of the ocean.