I’m not quite sure what compels me to write about immigration at this point, so many months after the start of the border-crossing hoopla. The most obvious reason, I suppose, is the fact that I’m an immigrant myself.

In 1971, my immediate family immigrated from Cuba to the US. No banana boat, thank you very much. From what I’m told it was a very nice airplane. My grandmother, thirty-five years later, still has her airplane ticket tucked away in her photo album.

We spent a month in the refugee camp in Miami, waiting for family to "claim" us and for the US Department of Immigration and Naturalization to process our paperwork, to file us away neatly and appropriately. We each got Green Cards, we each got social security numbers, we each got vaccinated. And we waited. And waited. And waited. Finally, a month after our arrival, a friend of my grandfather’s was able to sponsor us.

We left Miami and headed to New Jersey. There, the kindness of other Cuban immigrants is what kept us clothed and fed until my parents and grandparents found jobs. We were able to get a two-bedroom apartment in Weehawken for the seven of us—my parents, my grandparents, my uncle, my sister, and I. We were given gently used furniture, dishes, linens, etc. Basically, what we needed to start a new life.

While growing up, I didn’t know that we were poor. I didn’t know that not all little girls had their clothes sewed by their mothers from fabric remnants their fathers brought home from the factory. I didn’t know that anyone other than rich people could live in single-family houses. I didn’t know that staying up until 11 pm to greet your father home from work was unusual, or that other dads didn’t work six days a week and collapse on the seventh of exhaustion.

My parents both worked in factories, my mother as a seamstress and my father in a textile factory that manufactured uniform patches for the US Armed Forces. He took odd jobs on the weekend, which is how he learned to be an expert handyman. Good with math and his hands, he could build just about anything and over the last thirty-five years pretty much has. I think that had he been born in the US, my father would’ve made an excellent engineer. A far different beginning than that of an eight-year-old boy sent to work in the sugar cane fields.

Over the years, my parents worked hard and saved as much as they could. We did without a lot of things, but then so did a heck of a lot of people we knew. Eventually, they bought a multi-family home where we lived in the first floor apartment. It was smaller than the apartment we rented out on the second floor, but my mother wanted us to have a backyard. Even though it was little more than a slab of concrete.

Their encouragement, their support, is why my sister and I both have college degrees. Why we both have careers and homes we’re thanful to own. Their sacrifice—leaving their own families behind in Cuba—has shaped my life in ways I can only imagine. (My father hasn’t seen any of his brothers in more than 30 years.)

I have my own opinions about immigration, specifically how it pertains to security and our borders. But, I didn’t write this about that. I wrote this to share a story I am very privileged to share with thousands of others who have come to America seeking not only a better future, but a future in and of itself.

Though the circumstances may be different and we entered the United States legally, I can’t help but believe that leaving your family, your country, and everything you’ve ever known requires a great deal of courage. Regardless of whether you’re crossing a desert or an ocean.

I am deeply thankful that my parents were that courageous. That they realized that staying in Cuba would not give us the life they wanted for us. That they did, as my mom says simply, “what they had to.”

Sometimes, that's all anyone, any parent, can do. Sometimes, if you're lucky, that can mean everything.