It's Me, Sara Louise

Bonne Année tout le monde! Seven days into 2015 already… file that under ‘mind blown’.

So Gregory is on his way back to France this morning after the fastest four weeks in history. It was a whirlwind of a visit, but a truly wonderful one.

Now it’s time for us to get back to gloomy, January, reality with a Gregory Green Card update.

Here’s the deal… the good news; the NVC (that’s National Visa Center for those of you lucky enough to not be in the know) finally got back to us after our last 60 day wait (it took 64 days to be exact) and asked us for Gregory’s civil documents that are the last step before his interview at the embassy in Paris (please, please, please let this be it). Since Gregory was here and some of the documents we needed were back in France, we had to wait a week for his mother to send them to us before we could send them to the NVC, but we did manage to get them off before the end of the year. Go us.

Now for the bad news, as we were sending the documents off to the NVC, (instead of Gregory just bringing them to the embassy in Paris for the interview as we thought would happen), we just knew that we would be waiting forever again, and sure enough, yesterday morning I woke up to another dreaded, ‘please wait 60 days’ blah blah blah, putain merde’ letter (those last two words are very naughty and should be ignored, forgive me).

So yeah, we are still stuck waiting in ‘the process’. That’s what my Congressman’s office calls it, ‘a process’, and they say that, ‘the process takes time‘… process my hiney! Sending out three letters; one after another, basically stating that ‘we’re too busy‘ and ‘you’re going to have to wait two months before we even look at your file‘ is not part of a process, it’s inefficiency, so lets all stop pretending.

And here’s the problem with ‘the process’, When you’re in it, you have no idea how long it’s going to take, and there’s no one that can tell you. But one the one thing I do know is that it used to take a lot less time. I have friends whose spouses got their Green Cards in less than six months! Sure that was like five years ago, but c’mon! It’s already been over thirteen months for us, and I can predict we’re looking at at least another three, when we thought it would take like, 9 months, tops. Trust me, if we had any idea how long it would drag out (keeping in mind that it took four months for the processing of one form), I would still be hanging out in Le Petit Village, throwing back the Rosé and nibbling on baguettes instead of being roomies with my mother (my poor, poor mother), and I wouldn’t have just said goodbye to my husband… again!

Alors, here’s the deal, I, Sara Louise, am taking a stance. I refuse to let my life be ruled by the NVC any longer. Gregory and I spent six months of 2014 apart because of their inefficiency and that’s not OK, that’s not OK at all. So we’ve made a decision, Gregory will be returning to Texas in four weeks. He will be here for my birthday, he will be here for Valentine’s Day, he will be here for our fifth wedding anniversary, and he will stay until his interview at the embassy in Paris is scheduled, or his three months tourist visa is up, whichever comes first. He won’t be able to work while he’s here, so we’ll be broke, but so be it. At least we’ll be broke and together. Amen.