Speak of the devil

Speak of the devil. Mere hours after I last posted about my frustration over the silence on the immigration front, it finally ended. This morning I woke to an excited text from Nicolas and a much anticipated email:

Finally! We are now officially past the USCIS (US Citizenship and Immigration Services) and on to the NVC (National Visa Center). I was logged into the NVC site, pajama clad but suddenly wide awake, filling in payment details as quickly as my fingers could navigate the keyboard. In a couple of days when our payments have been processed, we'll have full access to the online forms and document submission sections of the website.

I'm kicking myself for overlooking the opportunity to pre-assemble all these documents. It will take us a couple of weeks (hopefully no more!) to acquire and translate everything that will be asked of us. That's a couple of weeks sooner that we could be reunited, entirely on us. [insert self-loathing here] Doing our best to make up for lost time, we jumped onto various British and Belgian government sites to formally request the papers that will bring us one step closer to life together.

Once we submit these documents, there's a 6-week wait to get the results. If we're lucky, our case will be transferred directly to the Embassy in France, through which Nicolas can schedule his medical visit and interview. Who knows? Maybe we'll be together before the year is out.

For now, a manila folder sits beside me, just waiting to be fattened.

Victoire, nine time zones off

I kept saying I'd share some fun SF updates. Among them, there was Pride. San. Francisco. Pride. Does it get any prouder? But that'll happen again next year, and hopefully I'll have someone special to share it with! This is the event that struck my blogger's fancy: a soccer game that required waking up before 9am on a Sunday morning.

This wasn't just any soccer match. It was the World Cup starring France. Full confession: I still hardly dragged myself out of bed. I've been coming down with a head cold that had different ideas for my morning. When the cheers outside my window and the google score count told me I had no more excuses, I pulled together as much blue and red as I could find, brushed my teeth, and ran out to the Civic Center to catch the last 15 minutes.

Allez les bleus !

It's the closest I've felt to France while on this side of the pond. There was a certain satisfaction to sharing a celebration with a bunch of compatriots, even (or especially?) ones unusually energized for this hour on an overcast Sunday morning. I realized I was feeling homesick for a place whose passport I don't even hold. To top it off, some of my first dates with Nicolas centered around the matches of the last World Cup, so it stung to have France win the very next World Cup and not get to share that. For a few moments, I got to imagine I was back home in France.

Then my husband sent me photos from said home, and I didn't have to imagine anymore. Maybe one of the biggest pros of the wait for his green card was the chance Nicolas had to get on the Champs Elysées tonight. I was so glad he got to be there to share this moment with his country.

Sweet victory flooded the Champs Elysées

It's not every day that the monotony of waiting to be reunited is punctuated with such moments of victory. Vive la France !

#FamiliesBelongTogether

A wave of guilt washed over me as I weaved through the parade of protestors walking past with their signs. Abolish Ice. Children don't belong in cages. I care, y don't u? I do care! And we all should. But life has a tendency of getting in the way. It was Saturday morning and my watch read 11:27. My aerial silks class was due to begin in 3 minutes. There just wasn't time. There never is. Some things are worth creating time, so after class, walking upstream against the packs of twos and threes slowly scattering away, signs by their sides, I headed over to catch the tail end of the rally outside city hall. I wanted to be counted. Separating families who are desperately seeking to escape violence isn't right. It isn't human. 

#FamiliesBelongTogether

Listening to everyone fight this fight wasn't easy. Not only was I ashamed of my government, but I was also heartbroken by how big this fight is going to have to be. Everyone here was talking about the most immediate and obvious immigration problem at hand, but all I could think about was how the government isn't only violently separating families at borders. Even those who follow the law, the "legal immigrants," suffer a calm and cold separation which, speaking from experience, can feel endless, hopeless. Months of silence from a government who holds our lives in its filing cabinets. Last January, I poured my heart and soul into a thick folder documenting every proof of our relationship, evidenced by a 380-page pdf copy that I've kept just in case we have to start all over. At the start of February, our sealed hopes and dreams went off in a postbox. A letter in mid-May, one piece of paper after 3.5 months, was our first light at the end of the tunnel. It has since been followed by more months of deafening silence. I feel powerless and betrayed by my own government. I never imagined it would treat its own citizens this way.

Last Sunday evening, after a weekend of reflection, I shared this: 

#FamiliesBelongTogether Proud of my new city and all the socially-minded citizens who care. Our immigration system is broken. And I know I speak from a place of privilege, but these marches really hit home. My family too has been separated by the USCIS. No, we haven't been put in cages or seen children torn from our arms. But, when 8 months into my marriage, my husband and I found ourselves with no obvious choice but to move to the US, we started packing our boxes and placed a call with an immigration lawyer only to learn he couldn't come with me. I am a US citizen, born and raised in America, to two US parents. Even I couldn't bring home my own husband, my chosen and legally-recognized family, with me. If an American living abroad chooses to move back to the US with a foreign spouse, the process to bring a spouse to the States takes about a year. And that's speedy for the US immigration services. We are the lucky ones. My husband is French, so he'll eventually get admitted to this country. Our own immigration services tear apart newlyweds, casually force even citizens from America's oldest ally to wait a year to rejoin an American spouse, and that's the legal process. That's the norm. Folks, this problem is a lot bigger than illegal crossings on the Mexican border. It's time for change.

I could talk all day, but I guess that's all I have to say. I really miss my husband. Only 37 days now until my next flight lands in Paris.