Just another Monday

After spending the weekend with a sick girl I was happy to see Monday for a change.  Ashley had a fever all weekend which culminated at 9 pm Sunday evening when the poor girl was sick all over the family room sofa.  These are the times it sucks the most to be a single parent.  I could care less about the mess really, but Ashley needs to be held and reassured after getting sick.  I understand my duties well, and thankfully she has come to the age where she knows that Mamí only has two hands.  She was fine once her stomach was empty which gave me the opportunity to clean up the mess before any damage was done.  Three blankets and her loyal stuffed puppy fell victim to the deluge, luckily her other favorite blanket was immediately available fresh out of the dryer.  I tried my hardest to get her to sleep in her own bed, but I should have known being sick trumps all arguments.  I woke up at a quarter to 4 with Ashley curled into my side.  She managed to nudge me over until I was less than a quarter of an inch away from falling out of bed.  The girl has talent.

This morning was our seventh immigration hearing.  I was expecting more of the same, belligerent guards and jaded officials, only to be taken completely by surprise.  Not to say that it was all flowers and sunshine, but no one went out of their way to be unpleasant for a change.  If I were less skeptical, I would say the guards by the metal detector were displaying empathy for me and my situation.  I looked around at the pleasant faces and felt like at any moment some idiot with a video camera would jump out of his hiding place to declare I was on Candid Camera. 

The waiting room was packed with people of all types and backgrounds; everyone was there on behalf of someone they cared for, someone who was detained and in trouble.  Immigration affects us all no matter your economic status; the rich lose money when their company’s produce rots in the fields for lack of workers and the middle class are thrust into poverty with the loss of a contributing member of their family.  Food gets more expensive, home improvement becomes a luxury, and children become wards of the state as their parents are ejected from the country.  This is not simply a problem of the middle class or just the poverty stricken, however, the individuals with money have the means to make problems go away much quicker than average people.  Maybe now is a good time to step off my soap box, but I wonder how much more suffering will be afflicted before policies change yet again to protect the persecuted.

I got to see Alberto and talk to him for several minutes after the hearing.  I managed to make him smile before we were kicked out and that made me feel like a hero.  It’s so rare that I see him smile during any of the visits, and when he does it’s almost never directed at me.  I understand and it’s not like I bring fantastic news whenever I go to visit him, but sometimes I miss seeing him smile.

It seems like Brian’s assistant is trying her best to piss me off.  They are now saying that our case was closed when Alberto left the country in 2008 and for June 2011 forward ‘we’ agreed to a flat fee of $2000.  We did not agree to anything.  We did not discuss anything remotely like what she told me.  The closest discussion we had to the alleged conversation was when I helped interview the witnesses and he told me he lost our accounting records.  We discussed crediting the account $750 for payments made during the period of time covered by the lost accounting records, but that is a long way from closing the case and reopening it for $2000.  I need to think about this, I’m not sure how I want to proceed.  If I accept the statement they’ve created I owe them $1,202.50; my calculations say that I owe them $1,500, but it offends my sensibilities to accept that they closed the file in 2008.  That would mean we paid Brian the $2000 deposit so he could scratch his ass, or our money paid for his iPad he likes to show off and every conceivable opportunity.  We’ll just have to wait and see where this goes next.

I had a moment of clarity w few days ago while engaging in an online support group discussion.  Another deportee’s wife was having an awful day, a day so terrible she “felt like dropping everything and jumping on a plane”.  I know those days all too well, and I was compelled to say:

The sad and terrible truth is that the pain stays with you.  Sometimes you hold it close to your breast like a lover and other times you try to lock it away in the closet like sordid secret, but it will still be there.  You may get to the point where you can keep it in the closet, locked away so you don’t feel it anymore, but that’s even worse.  Something will always remind you what is missing and the pain returns as if the bandage covering the hole in your heart was suddenly and maliciously ripped away. 

I suppose my own bandage has been ripped away time and time again, but I have learned to survive the pain and loneliness.  Actually, for me the worst part is how lonely I am.  I have family and a few friends, but do any of them really understand what this is like?  I can’t compare this to the pain of divorce since divorce is the end of a relationship, but in reality someone chose to make that decision.  I would think this is like becoming a widow; the relationship ended while there was still love, one half of the couple is gone, and no one chose to take this path.  I am a USCIS widow desperately trying to resurrect my marriage from suspended animation.  May God grant me the courage to continue fighting for my family, and the strength to survive the hardships yet to come.

“I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I’m not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.”

Robert McCloskey

Ciao