The Coffee Girl

This summer, I had the privilege of taking a trip with my mother. She’s 80. I’m… well, let’s just say we’re both old enough to know that time together is something you don’t take for granted.

I first visited my parents in the United States, and then my mother and I traveled to Poland for two weeks. We spent time in Sandomierz and Radom with family—three of my cousins came from Germany and Wroclaw with their children—and then set off to revisit some of our favorite places, including Krakow, Nowy Sącz, and Wroclaw.

My mother had appointed me Manager of the Trip.

I was responsible for the logistics, directions, bookings, train schedules, and answering the never-ending question: “What are we doing next?” There were probably dozens of things I was managing behind the scenes that she never even noticed.

But throughout the trip, I also held another role—one that turned out to be far more important: Coffee Girl. Whenever my mother wanted coffee, I was on it.

The first cup at breakfast - a familiar routine. A coffee break after a long walk. A quiet café on a town square. Somehow, those small coffee stops became some of my favorite moments of the entire trip. We sat together. We talked. We watched people pass by. We remembered family stories. We laughed. Sometimes we simply enjoyed the silence.

In everyday life, our time together is usually limited to visits, phone calls, and catching up on news. This trip gave us something different: two uninterrupted weeks together.

And somewhere along the way, something shifted for me.

Being back in Poland, surrounded by family and places connected to our history, helped me understand my roots in a way I never could from a distance. I heard familiar stories differently. I looked at my mother differently.

I found myself appreciating more deeply some of the experiences, sacrifices, disappointments, and difficult choices that shaped her life—and, in turn, shaped mine.

For most of my life, I had known her primarily as my mother. On this trip, I got to know her a little more as a woman who had lived a long and complicated life of her own.

That realization stayed with me after we returned to our respective homes. My mother returned to North Carolina. I returned to Bangkok. We resumed our separate lives on different continents, but I found myself thinking about her differently than before.

It also made me think about my own son. I wondered whether, as he builds his own life, he is beginning to know me differently too—not only as his mother, but as a woman with a longer story than he has yet heard.

There was something quietly beautiful about being both the Manager and the Coffee Girl. I was taking care of her. But I was also simply her daughter.

And somewhere in those two weeks, between train schedules, family gatherings, old memories, and coffee breaks, I reconnected with a part of myself—and with where I came from.

Maybe that’s one of the unexpected gifts of getting older. We begin to see the people we love not only through the roles they have played in our lives, but as human beings with stories of their own.

And sometimes, all it takes is a cup of coffee and a little time together.