This story is part of my heartfelt series, Love Across Borders, where love defies time zones, languages, generations — and even attics.

💛 5-minute read

As I publish this, my husband’s on an airplane (incidentally, where we first met), going to visit his mother for her birthday. With this all-too-familiar pang, the sadness and happiness that come with such bittersweet moments. I can’t help but turn to the stories that keep us together, despite the distance.

I know it’s important that Alex sees his mom. And I’m grateful that he can. But it doesn’t make it easy. The distance still weighs heavily—her there, us here. Him there, me here. It’s the same ache I feel when the kids are gone. We’re scattered now. Skylar is in Spain. Alex is in Bolivia. I’m holding things together from here.

And yet, in the swirl of missing and remembering, something sweet happens: a new baby girl was born into the Cunningham family on my dad’s birthday. Gemini twins, I joked. Then I remembered Mamita’s birthday is just six days later. I guess that makes her the triplet.

Maybe when the stars are aligned just right, it reminds us to look up. Love doesn’t follow borders in the sky, it leaps from star to star. And there’s always the glorious moon to behold.

One of my most prized gifts still hangs in my office. A friend gave it to me when we were young and crazy, and I missed my flight to Sydney, Australia. (Speaking of missing something!) 

The frame reads: “I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.”

And it’s true. Wherever the moon shines, it’s the same moon we’re all looking at, no matter how far apart we are.

Alex will stay in Bolivia for two weeks. It’s necessary—the altitude demands it—but it’s a long journey, and a lot of recouping (just to stay in the same time zone). He’s sandwiched between my sadness and her joy. And I know how much it means to her. To him. To me.

I think about Mamita and Papito (staring at that same moon from a heavenly viewpoint—and how the stories they told sounded like fiction, until you realize: they’re real. Papito would joke that Mamita had an “overactive imagination.”

Of course she did. How do you live through what she did without activating the imagination? It activates ours just by hearing about it.

While his stories were just as grand, you could never tell who had the better story when we’d all get together. We used to joke that we were the United Nations.

But it’s Mamita’s birthday—this is her story of firsts. Of the big dreams that came of the momentous day she was born, in war-ravaged Poland in 1943.

Before her birth, while her father was off fighting in World War II,  her mother, Mama Zosia, was at home, secretly housing a Jewish couple in the attic. Hidden even from the house staff and her own young children.

The husband died shortly after. The wife, fled to France. Years passed.

In 1966, Mamita graduated from university, and just before Poland sealed its borders under socialism, she charmed a guard and escaped to France.

There, she stayed with a woman she only knew to be “aunt”—the woman her mother had housed in her attic.

Mamita didn’t intend to stay in France. She studied English at the Alliance Française, worked as a chemical engineer for a French perfumery, and planned to return to Poland. 

But life had other plans.

She met Papito, married, and had her firstborn in France. Instead of returning to Poland, she headed south to Bolivia to meet her in-laws.

The descendant of Maria Walewska—Napoleon’s mistress—with her blue veins to prove she had “blue blood,” Mamita found her noble lineage didn’t help much when she was trying to learn a new language and adapt to a whole new way of life.

Now that’s love across borders—something Mamita has lived for decades. Poland, France, Bolivia—and later, Brazil, Canada, the U.S. A foreigner everywhere she went, yet each turned into home, even as she remained far from the family she carried with her.

These stories we tell keeps our love strong. They can’t be separated the way time and distance can. They are eternal—and for that, I find joy. 

And when Alex and I go to dinner with friends—ones who don’t know the stories—we get to share them with new ears and find a new sense of unity. It’s as if we’re expanding our family, adding new cultures and identities to accompany us as we go.

She may no longer be the girl who charmed a guard to slip out of Poland just before the border closed, or the woman whose mother risked everything to hide a Jewish couple in their attic. Maybe she no longer feels like the descendant of Maria Walewska with blue blood running through her veins.

But she is, and will always be, the mother of two sons—and for the one I married, I will be forever grateful.

Not to mention, she shares a birthday week with my dad—his Gemini twin across continents. Maybe that’s the kind of symmetry that only stories understand.

I’m still not sure what this story is passing forward—maybe a piece of legend, maybe just a feeling—but whatever it is, it’s wrapped in love.

Happy Birthday, dear Mamita. I love you from Poland to Bolivia to the moon and back.

If this story resonates with you, I invite you to explore another piece, Hidden Truths: Finding Resilience in a Piece of Poland, where I visited a Polish cemetery, shared the story of meeting Alex on an airplane with a stranger, and felt Mamita’s history whispering through the silence.

These stories talk to each other. They remind us that love isn’t just something we feel—it travels.