Tag: Canada

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Summer Family Reunion, Mission Impossible, Part II

A friend of mine is a midwife educator and we took a few classes with her before our baby was born. In one of them, on the topic of pain, she introduced us to a great saying: FEAR is False Expectations Approaching Reality. It buoyed me at the time in the hopes that labor wouldn’t be as painful as I expected. Although I can’t say the birth of my daughter was less painful than I feared, I can say that traveling to the U.S. with her was.

There were many things that allowed my FEAR to be just that—false expectations. Some things were better than I worried they’d be, and some things were worse. But overall, it was a much more pleasant experience than I imagined—as another American friend who’s a long-timer in Mexico has suspected may be the case with me, I might be psyching myself out to be pleasantly surprised in the end. Not a typical personality characteristic of mine, but when it comes to love and exile, it can be a useful tactic.

The cost was not a problem because I did not keep track of how much money I spent like I have on other trips. Why bother? Keeping track of my receipts wouldn’t change how much I had to shell out, that I’ve been unemployed for the last 24 months, or that my financial safety net is developing some seriously large holes. In the end, I had enough to get back home.

The family reunion was a success, if you don’t count the fact that my husband wasn’t there. But then again, neither were several aunts, uncles, and cousins…so why be nit-picky? The important thing was that my daughter got to see her grandparents (my parents) again, meet her uncle (my brother) and his fiancée, her great-aunt & uncle and a couple of their relatives, a good handful of my high school friends, and a large number of my parents’ friends from work.

One unexpected dynamic was that despite his absence, Margo had a much stronger presence than past trips, and I chalk that up to him being present through our daughter. She looks a lot like him, questions directed to me about her invariably brought him up, and many people intuited how much she (and me, by default) must miss him.  So it was nice not having to tiptoe around the subject of his absence like a big white elephant.

I’d done my grieving over not being able to get a Canadian visa for Margo for travel. I’d prepared myself emotionally and let loose a few floodgates en route to have the best mindset possible upon arrival. Sure, a few tense moments occurred as can happen with anyone traveling with kids and aligning parenting philosophies with the grandparents. But I was surprisingly solid when it came to not falling apart.

It might have been because I convinced myself, as I told our daughter, that there were some good things about him staying home: he had to work, we saved money, someone had to feed the chickens and the bunny and the cats and water the garden, someone had to watch the house. So when we’d make our phone calls, it felt more like he was serving a purpose back home than languishing lamenting about not being with us. That was fortunate.

I also might not have had time to grieve his absence since I was so darn busy taking care of the baby. Besides fully co-parenting with my husband, we also had someone coming in a few days a week to help with the baby for the month before we left, and so I was used to getting a large amount of help with the baby at all hours. Her grandparents were great with her, feeding, entertaining, and bathing her to everyone’s delight, but spending the nights getting up alone with her and putting her to bed during Fourth of July fireworks and the days prior were more tiring than normal.

One FEAR that was more true than I expected was the exhaustion factor of the actual bus and air travel by ourselves. But even so, it was kind of funny to see a couple in the airport with two young kids bickering over some aspect of parental care mid-escalator ride. In the state I was in, baby hanging from the sling, (albeit balanced nicely with backpack weight), with luggage in tow, I smiled knowingly at the woman and said, just breathe. She looked surprised for a moment but then smiled back at me. Then they went back to their bickering and I thought to myself, I don’t have to deal with that aspect of traveling together, even if my back is aching!

The author and her daughter at her parents' home in NY

Another silver lining to the exhaustion was that all of that extra time with the baby by myself also led to something special—we bonded like when she was a newborn, and that was perhaps the sweetest unexpected benefit of all.

When I got back to Mexico, I got some feedback from friends with children that gave me some insight about the fact that, although I may have unique circumstances as to why my husband isn’t able to travel with us, it’s surprisingly common for many of my friends to fall into the traveling alone with kids department. One friend related how her husband is stuck in the PhD program from hell for almost 10 years, which has forced her to strike out camping on her own with two small boys. A new American friend here in Mexico traveled alone with not one but two kids up to the States in June—not because her husband doesn’t qualify for a visa but because he forgot to renew it. Others travel alone because their spouses can’t get time off work.

Although I feel womanly solidarity in that we all face similar challenges with our children and I empathize with their spouses’ unavailability for travel (and I also bow down to their ability to juggle multiple infants alone!), when I mentioned this to Margo, as well as the pros of the “holding down the fort” argument, he wasn’t 100% convinced. “Yeah that’s all true, but I would like to go.” Knowing he’s someone who doesn’t express their wants and needs often, his words didn’t fall on deaf ears. And perhaps that is the one expectation that most disappointingly approached reality: that on the subject of traveling together as a family,  reunion or otherwise, bright sides or not, ultimately we didn’t have any choice but for Daddy to stay home.

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Summer Family Reunion: Mission (Im)possible

Margo's Visa Denial Form Letter

They say money is of no import when it comes to love, as was evident with the recent royal wedding. Despite coming from more humble origins, that was my motto when it came to this summer’s vacation plans: family reunion or bust, no matter the cost. Even if I’ve got to withdraw funds from my retirement to pay for our plane tickets (that is what four years of un/under-employment abroad will do to you…horrors!) and tackle the equally nightmarish logistics. So many people to reunite. Get my daughter to meet her uncle (my brother), his fiance, her great-grandmother (my dear Grandma), her great-aunt & uncle who helped put on her baby shower when she was still in my belly, her doting grandparents (my folks) whom she Skypes with every week.  Get my husband to see all his in-laws for the first time in- 7 years for my Grandma, 5 years for my brother, I don’t even remember how many years for my aunt & uncle. Orchestrate all of this from my laptop in Mexico. Most challenging, achieve a luxury my kind rarely obtains—air travel with my husband for the first time EVER in ten years.

Since I got together with my husband in 2001, I’ve always flown alone in the U.S.— Margo simply never could accompany me. It’s become this tacitly accepted but stressful white elephant every time I go home. But now, faced with the need to return home with a baby, because of the level to which my husband and I co-parent our daughter, because of the extent to which I loathe the idea of international travel alone with an infant, I was willing to pull out all the stops to reunite my family this summer—this time not in my hometown, but in CANADA of all places, where my husband has no outstanding immigration record. Ever since my parents and I visited friends in Ottawa in 2009, it sounded like the perfect plan since Margo can’t legally travel to the U.S., but nothing was stopping him from traveling to Canada, why not just find a cabin, round up our Northeastern family & pop them a few hours over the northern border, and hang out on a gorgeous lake for a week or two?

Ironically enough, the month after I went home to Mexico to share this plan with Margo, the Canadian government announced their new policy of requiring Mexicans to apply for temporary resident visas in order to cross their borders. Eww. I know they “have their reasons,” but that sure took the wind out of our sails. Applying for a passport is one thing, but a visa is a lot more labor-intensive. We tabled it for a year.  Then, when I was pregnant in 2010, the idea seemed more attractive for traveling as a family with the baby, but we weren’t so motivated to submit a high-stress app at the time either.

But 2 years later, with a 4 month-old, a new year in 2011, and seeing how hard it was on everyone to go without seeing the baby in person, I decided to start the painstaking process of putting together a tourist visa application to Canada for  Margo.  Even though he never had any illusions that he’d get accepted—Margo is way beyond me in terms of pessimism.  I spent 3 months compiling nearly one-hundred sheaves of paper documenting all our assets, background, and reasons why he wouldn’t stay in Canada (including tracking down the middle names, D.O.B.s, addresses, and occupations of each of his TWELVE brothers and sisters), booked a $500 deposit on a 10-person cabin for the entire immediate & a few extended family & friends of mine on Georgian Bay in Ontario (convinced the owner to give us a refund if we didn’t get the visa within one month), and paid the nearly $100 non-refundable application fee, ~$20 processing center fee, and $30 in certified mail fees.

And then we waited 3 weeks to find out, in the middle of a video chat with the family, that NO, Margo could NOT travel to Canada, not now, nor should he apply again the near future unless something really major changes. Although Margo interpreted it as “not having enough money in the bank,” many reasons were cited on the form letter, most notably his “family ties,” which I read as the fact that he has so many brothers & sisters. What can one do about that? Or, that our bank accounts were too low to guarantee we could fund our trip. Wha? Several thou between us is not enough for a 10 day trip? What I really suspect, however, was his lack of international travel, and namely, the big scarlet R on his record of having been removed from the U.S. over 10 years ago. Although I (and an experienced member of the Canadavisa.com Immigration Forum) hoped that old removal wouldn’t have ruled out a visa nod, the denial felt reminiscent of mandatory minimums—a punishment beyond the actual infraction—and a slap in the face.

I had to break it to the fam.  I think everyone was in shell-shock. Luckily we hadn’t told Grandma so she wasn’t let down. My mom’s response was the best. I won’t paraphrase it here since she might not want me to, but suffice it to say it included an expletive and a promise to be selective about where she spends her tourist dollars in the future. Which is a legitimate concern even some Canadians have expressed about requiring visas of Mexicans. She also very kindly contributed toward the lost application fee. My poor Dad was still holding out hope that there was someone he could call in the Canadian government to get Margo his visa. No, Dad, there isn’t, I had to say cynically, and besides, I was too destroyed by the news myself to even deal with the situation for a few weeks.

By that time, the rest of the family either started to gel their own summer plans, and/or wonder what my Plan B was going to be. So I needed to go back to the drawing board. Luckily, the cabin owner accepted my cancellation and returned my $500 deposit; although, the Canadian govt. wasn’t as gracious to return our ~$150. When I started to go through the motions this time around, I felt somehow less motivated, knowing that Margo couldn’t accompany us…then little roadblocks like who was available when and where and whatnot would crop up. But I kept reminding myself that the bottom line is my daughter—she needs to stay connected with her U.S. family.

It looks like something is going to work out in terms of getting me and my daughter some northern exposure this summer—a lot of us are thinking out of the box in order to make something happen.  But whether or not the whole family will be together in the same place at the same time is yet to be determined. Worse, barring a medical or political miracle (almost 90, my grandma hasn’t air traveled since 2004, and has physical conditions which wouldn’t go over well at our home’s high elevation of 7,000′), my grandmother may never see her grandson-in-law again—and in essence, that makes this chica’s vision of a full family reunion Mission Truly Impossible.