My parents were both born in Poland in 1962. My father lived in the towering grey apartment buildings that characterized the soviet-inspired architecture of Warsaw at the time. Since the fall of Communism, in the spirit of rebirth, the ugly blocks have been repainted in outrageous pastels and candy colors. His apartment building, where his brother still lives, is now splashed with three different shades of pink, a pale yellow, leaf green, orange, and lavender. My mother grew up in a tiny village forty kilometers away from the border with the Soviet Union (now Belarus). Her mother’s sister and brother and some of their progeny still live there. The village has 20 houses, and little more than half of them have permanent residents. It is one of the last remnants of the traditional peasant world that once characterized most of Europe.
They met while attending the University of Warsaw in the 1980’s. They casually dated on and off for a few years, and when my mother graduated in 1987, she moved to America. A year previously, her mother had gone to Pennsylvania, where her own first cousin, who had been born in America and who she had never met, lived. She married him so she could get a green card. My mother came straight to New York, where she lived in an apartment in Sunset Park with some friends who had graduated university with her. My father wasn’t so lucky. He was still in Poland repeating his sophomore year of college for the fifth time. He didn’t really go to class much because he worked at an underground printing press, publishing and distributing banned books, and anti-communist newspapers and pamphlets. After a few too many run-ins with the police, and seeing as the whole getting a college degree thing wasn’t working out too well, he decided to cut his losses and join my mother in America after a year. At this point the government of Poland was nearing collapse and passports were being given out just to get trouble causing citizens out of the country.
My father waited in a tiny room with one teller and a line of over 100 people to pick up his passport. Communist Poland was notorious for its long lines. People waited hours and days to pick up ration cards, furniture, and food. The waiting lists for cars were months and years. The wait for an apartment in Warsaw often stretched decades. My father stood in line thinking about how America would be different, full of freedom and democracy, and no waiting for hours for basic human necessities. On his third day in America, he went to the DMV and his illusions were quickly shattered. At the DMV in Newark, New Jersey, you could exchange a foreign driver’s license for an American one without taking any additional tests. He had intended to look at the street names and house numbers in New Jersey so he could put down one as an address at the DMV, but had forgotten to do so. When he encountered the “address” line on the form he was filling out, he simply made one up.
My parents moved in together with my grandmother in an apartment in Canarsie. Within 6 months, on tax day in 1989, they were married. They had no idea it was tax day. They were never boyfriend and girlfriend and they were never engaged so I’m not really sure what was going on there but they’re cute together so it’s alright. Being undocumented, my parents couldn’t get official, “on the books” jobs. My mother worked as a housekeeper, and my father started off working construction, moved on the selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door, and finally settled on driving a cab. They kept trying to conceive so they can have a child that was an American citizen, to reduce their chance of being deported. They tried for six years with no success. Because they were undocumented, they had no health insurance, so my mother couldn’t go to a gynecologist to get checked out. In October of 1995, Pope John Paul II came to New York City. My mother went to one of his masses and prayed to conceive a child. A few months later, she discovered she was pregnant with me.
Because she lacked access to health care, my mother didn’t have an obstetrician while pregnant with me. Despite being 34, just a year short of the cut-off for a “high-risk pregnancy”, there were no sonograms or other examinations beyond those that could be provided by a midwife my mother knew. My parents had no idea what gender I would be until the moment I left the womb. When my mother was in labor, she was turned away from the hospital because the receptionist claimed the hospital didn’t accept non-emergency patients on the Fourth of July, and a woman nine and a half months pregnant with contractions was apparently not an emergency. She came back the next day and and after a long labor gave birth to me. I was raised in large part by my grandmother because both my parents worked long hours. On my first day of school, I was confused when I spoke Polish to my teacher and she didn’t understand.
Unfortunately, my parents weren’t able to get green cards until after my little brother was born in 2001. After that, things got a lot better. My mother got a job as a social worker, what she had been trained for almost 15 years earlier. My father started working for one of his friends who had his own business. They were finally able to leave the country without worry of never being allowed back in, so after they saved up enough money, they took me and my brother to Poland in the summer of 2007 to show us where they grew up and the rest of our family. Surprisingly, I felt much more at home there than I did in Brooklyn.
