The Poland Story
by Wendy Hultmark

“Oh, Wen!” she suddenly remembered, just as we were wrapping up our weekly chat. “I got to tell The Poland Story this week!” We are on the phone, but I can see it: the sparkle in her eye. The shimmy of the shoulders that cascades down to her seated hips, wiggling her bum side to side. Mom’s excited, everyone…buckle up!

There are many ways I could introduce you to my mother, but The Poland Story may be the best way to capture her essence.

“Oh yeah?” I smile and nod, eyebrows raised expectantly in response to this well-worn exclamation. “How’d it go?”

“Well.” A thump as her hand slapped her lap, her back erect. “I could tell they were very interested. Because they asked lots of questions.” This thing my mother once said about the telling of The Poland Story has now become the only measure of interest that matters in my house, and a classic “Nancy-ism.”

The latest captive audience for Mom’s performance is the group of ladies from the Y’s Silver Sneakers program. The stage: the McDonald’s where all the septuagenarians and octogenarians go after yoga on Tuesdays.

The Poland Story started out as my story. Then it became our story. Then it became undeniably and unequivocally, her story.  I’m happy to transfer ownership of the story over to her.  She is a better home for it, with the completeness, drama, and delight with which she tells it. Nearly thirty years after the original events, I can safely say that it almost never enters my mind, this Poland Story.  But for my mother, it is always right there — a jack-in-the-box of a story, waiting to spring out of its container with the slightest turn of the handle.

Since hers is the best version of the story, I’ll share hers here.

“Wendy had gone off to Europe with her college friend, Lisa,” she begins, “the summer before her senior year of college. There she was. So far away from home, with just her friend, and no family nearby. We got postcards, and occasional phone calls from a local pay phone. It was really hard for me that summer, her being so far away on her own. It worried me, you know?  Her being in Europe for an entire summer…”

(In the weeks before I left for Europe, my mother reminded our family multiple times of her teenage trip to Germany, which somehow managed to garner local newspaper coverage. She grew up in a small town, I will add quite redundantly.  And she hinted, more than once, with a twinkling eye that she just may call the Trumbull Times to alert them to my trip abroad. International travel was a pretty big deal where she came from in the world, in time and in life.)

… “And then, I get a call from her from Poland.”

Her eyes roll upwards, her lids flutter in anticipation of the memory of her anxiety.

“‘Mom, don’t worry,’ is the first thing Wendy says to me. And I think, ‘Oh my God, what’s happened?’ She’s so far awaaaaay,” she groans with the strain of the distance.    

“‘Lisa and I are in Warsaw’, Wendy says. ‘We’re staying with the family of a girl we met in the town center.’”

“‘What?! Who are these people? What were you thinking?’ I’m saying to myself.  But I tried to stay calm.”

“Because Wendy was acting like it was no big deal. But she’s in a foreign country and she’s staying with strangers? She met on the street?”

At this point, she’s leaning forward, hand clutching the space over her heart.

A deep draw inward of breath. A sickened “Oh my God,” like she might about be sick.

“And then, she tells me that she’s been sick! She passed out in their bathroom!  She had a fever of 104! Some Polish doctor told her in broken English that she had meningitis?! And the strange family is giving her medicine every four hours, including in the middle of the night?! I still couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe she trusted these people…”

“But, it turns out that these were really nice people. And thank God they found her! Because can you imagine if she got sick in some strange hotel? What would have happened?!!! … They really were so good to her. Thank God!”

“I just had to find a way to thank these people. I had to connect with this girl’s mother. Because as a mother,” — she pauses now and beats that heart space gently with her fist — “I know that mother understands.”

“Even though Dominika’s — that’s the girl who found Lisa and Wendy in the square — mother didn’t speak English, I wrote her a letter and we stayed in touch with Dominika translating, long after Wendy’s trip to Europe was over.”

“And, then, the best part is, a few years later, Dominika was going to get married. And she invited all of us! Of course, Rick’s family is from Poland, so that was even more special. But we all. got. to go. to Poland. And meet the family!  And be at this wedding in a whole other country. And to see where Rick’s family was from. Because Rick is Polish, you know.”

“It was uh-mazing. I mean, it was un-believable.”

Curtain closes, wild applause, mic drops.

……………………………………

Of course, the events in my version of the story are exactly the same, but without the same flare in the telling.  At the time of my stay in Warsaw, I was barely out of my teen years. Life was still a series of new experiences strung together.   The Poland Story, to me, was a kinda-interesting story, but not that big a deal.  Not the kind of story that still feels urgent to share thirty years later.

I did go to Europe with my friend Lisa the summer before our senior year of college.

We arrived in Warsaw to find the hotel we planned on staying was gone. And for reasons I can no longer recall, we struggled to find another place to stay.

We met a girl our age named Dominika, who spoke English and was running errands with her mother.

She offered for us to stay with her family. We politely declined. She said she’d come back in an hour and if we were still stuck without a place, to come back to that spot. (I guess Dominika knew something about lodging in downtown Warsaw that we didn’t.)

An hour later, she came back and found us still standing there. Lisa and I went back to their apartment to stay.

The next day I fell ill with a high fever and fainted in their bathroom.  A local doctor was called, who told me I had “How you say? Meningitis!” which prompted a total freakout on my part, and as Lisa likes to remind me, there were tears. “Don’t cry, Wendy,” cooed Dominka’s dad. “Don’t cry…”

I was given I–know–not–what kind of medicine for I–know–not–what disease I really had. It needed to be administered every four hours. So, Dominika’s father woke himself up during the night to tend to the sick animal in his daughter’s bedroom. He softly called “Wennndy,” in his Polish accent, to the ragamuffin stranger asleep on the floor. He gave me my medicine. I was not unaware of the dangers involving a strange older man in the bedroom of a twenty–year–old girl. But as a twenty–year–old girl, I was totally uncomprehending of my own vulnerability.  I was just grateful that someone had stepped in to substitute–parent me during my hour of need.

Some years later, we received the good news that Dominika and her boyfriend Michal were to be married.  My family and I were invited, as was Lisa. We all went and had a nice time.

Dominika and Michal divorced a couple years later.

And one day, a few weeks after returning from that summer abroad, I picked up a message on the answering machine. For me. From the Trumbull Times.  She really did it. She had really tried to stop the presses with the urgent news of my travels. Aching with the sweetness of her pride and excitement, I deleted the message without returning the call. To this day, my mother believes they never acted on her hot tip.

So that is The Poland Story, as told by me.

At first, it was unbearably embarrassing to sit through my mom’s unadulterated emotional expression of motherhood through the telling of her version of events, so dramatic and different from mine.  But the years have passed, and with their passing, I understand how fleeting our time together is. The thick hard shell of my discomfort has softened and eventually disintegrated completely.  Each time The Poland Story is told, I allow myself more and more to be loved through the telling of this story. As one can only be loved through a mother’s telling of a thing.

It’s just better when she tells it.

January 2025
Massachusetts, USA