Running Away again

Blooming Peaches had a very good question for the last post. The question was

so did the situation create a rift between you two or was it the two of you guys against the entire community?

did anything good happen when you moved in lol? you only talk about the frustrations... i am curious if you were happy with your decision at all

The truth is, I was pretty miserable living there even for a short time. The first few days we were together were great. I was always on a huge high when he picked me up from the airport, so excited and happy and relieved to be together again. The problem was, the reality of the pressure around us really got to M. He would get depressed because of the accusations and the looks he got every time he went to the mosque. For M, the mosque is a huge source of comfort. It is where he goes to feel better, he feels peaceful there and for the other people in the mosque to take that away, it was just too much for him.

In addition to this, the main language in his province was French, and I only speak English and Spanish and French is not one of the five languages M speaks. It was an all-around uncomfortable experience. M always said he considered me his ally, but sometimes when everyone around you is against your ally, your ally doesn't look all that great to you, see my point?

At any rate, after the egging experience and the fight that triggered it, I was sure I could not live in M's town and was certain that I was going home at the end of the summer. I immediately updated my resume and called my employer back. By the end of the first month I was there, my school system had scheduled me for school interviews. My old school even called me back to offer me my old job back, which I happily declined. I hated that job.

I started really pushing hard for M to get the required divorce certificate from his parents and by early July, after four and a half months they finally sent it and I was able to submit it to the US Consulate in Montreal. As soon as I sent it, they placed our case in Administrative Processing. This means they again had to verify the validity of the document and this time it would be sent to Islamabad Pakistan. In research I discovered that Administrative Processing could take as long as "they" wanted. Six months later, we still would not have an answer as to the validity of the certificate.

The Opposite of Over Easy. . .

It's funny the things that I remember from those years. Memories get a little hazy over time, but some things I remember very clearly. The other day, I was washing dishes and flashing back to the day that M flew to Pakistan. I had that first immigration package all signed and copied and ready to go. I was so excited, that I carried it away from the airport with me knowing that as soon as I got into the US I would mail it.

I felt so independent staying in a hotel alone the night after I dropped him off. . . .I got up the next morning in this teeny tiny town determined to find a post office to mail it from. I had asked directions and smiled the whole time I walked around half-lost thinking that this one day of extra time was going to make things faster than waiting to mail it tomorrow when I got home. Even then I had this strange feeling that something was not right. . .but I had no idea what was in store for us.

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I had no idea what I was getting into trying to "live" with hubby in his little apartment. Okay, my husband is Muslim (*gasp*) and I am not, at all. M's apartment was right across the street from the local mosque, not just the local mosque, the regional mosque, the biggest one in the province. It was a mostly Pakistani mosque with a large Egyptian and small Arab population. On Fridays and Sundays the streets were especially full, but it was pretty busy every day, all day. At any time you could find bearded and robed men seated on the front steps, often having heated discussions, about what I will never know, they were always in Arabic or one of a variety of South Asian dialects.

If you think the white girl gets stared at while travelling in Pakistan or Egypt or wherever, that is nothing compared to the white girl who suddenly appears with the Muslim who lives across the street from the mosque. Not just any Muslim who lives across the street from the mosque. . .the muslim who has attended this moque for more than eight years and knows EVERYONE, but refuses to talk about . . . the white girl.

Because the mosque had refused to perform our marriage, they somehow got the impression that we just didn't get married, and this made things all the worse. There were members who would follow us down the street staring at us, people who would sit across from us at the restaurant and stare at us and people who only stared at us as we walked in and out of the building. One guy was so obvious that I walked backwards down the street so that I too could stare at him. Once, M got so angry that he had to talk to one man in our favorite restaurant, and he stopped.

It was bad enough that we got reports from two of our closest friends about conversations they had with members of the mosque where they had to "defend" us by testifying on the validity of our marriage. One particularly nasty neighbor made claims to THE IMAM of the mosque about our "illegal" acts. . . those of a marital nature. The stress level in our house was pretty high with all of these stories. I thought they were funny, but M was a lot more sensitive about it. He was the one who had to be questioned and confronted about it in a place, the mosque, that he had once considered a peaceful and safe place to go.

Everything culminated into one big fight wherein M did something really, really stupid. I will not post it here, but I was angry enough to make a complete fool of myself in a manner loud enough to be heard by the entire building where we were living. . .this is not saying much, since I could always hear the kids upstairs rolling in an office chair and was a party to every phone conversation the Egyptian next door ever had. . .but it was loud enough that when we were finished I walked outside to find my car, egged.

I spent a lot of time thinking about that divorce certificate. Was it real? If it was not real, did M know? What would happen to the case if it turned out that the certificate was a fake? Were we not really married? We had used the divorce certificate M's family sent us as proof when we got married. I was exhausted after the interview. I had only slept for about two hours during the snowstorm because I kept tossing and turning. I wanted to make sure I woke up early enough to make it to the interview and now, one of my "worst case scenarios" had actually come true. There was absolutely nothing I could do but wait.

What if the divorce certificate was real, but the consulate wouldn't accept it? What if we couldn't get M's family to obtain the real certificate? We'd already looked online for ways to obtain it and it was not a possibility. Would M have to go back again to Pakistan just to get the certificate? What would happen if he went? What if, he was still married to that woman, he went back there and obtained a better fake divorce certificate. . .

I could. not. sleep.

Two weeks later I was back home in the US when the letter from the consulate arrived. The certificate we had submitted was not enough. We would have to submit a certificate from the Union Council over the area where the woman lived, hundreds of miles away from M's family and thousands of miles from where I sat at that moment, angry and crying. I called M and yelled at him.

It was the last week of February, my work contract was up in June. As a teacher, the contracts are renewed year by year. I hated the school where I worked. The county didn't allow first year teachers to transfer and I was lonely. I made a decision that I was moving to Canada. M was certain he could get the certificate, but I had no faith. I typed up my resignation and started making plans. I would move the furniture from my apartment to M's barren apartment in Canada. I would get out of my lease early and save a little bit of cash to make a start. I would spend the summer in Canada and we would start the paperwork for my immigration. We would not stop M's paperwork, but it would be our own little "race" to see which would finish first. We still didn't have the new divorce certificate from Pakistan and it had been nearly four months.

I would come back to the US and work as a Paramedic while we waited. June came, and I drove straight to M's home from work. We were going to live together for the first time as husband and wife and I was excited, we had been married more than a year.

Hopeless

The world felt like it was crumbling up around me. I was prepared for the long wait for a waiver. I was prepared to fight about the legalities surrounding whether or not my husband should be forced to file a waiver at all, but here I was being told that they were doubting whether or not my husband was even legally divorced. I had spent a lot of time worrying about this when it came time to submit the divorce certificate initially, nine months before, but when it made its way through the USCIS and then the NVC, I had, wrongly, assumed that it had passed muster.

For those of you who aren't aware, US Immigration takes polygamy very seriously. They also take fraudulent marriages (when they rarely correctly diagnose them) very seriously. Every piece of paper related to a marriage visa that we submitted had to have a certification on it that he was not married to anyone else, and we had CONFIDENTLY signed them. Now, instead of filing a waiver and moving on to simply waiting, we were going to have to figure out if his divorce was valid. We knew it was valid in Pakistan, for his "ex-wife" had remarried years ago, but how to prove that to the United States Consulate in Montreal?! The certificate would be sent to Islamabad by fax and we would be notified of the result in "a few days."

I was crying for the rest of our consular visit, quietly, angrily, crying. I was not only angry at the consular officer for the hold up, but I was angry with M. I had begged him to obtain a different certificate, the type I had read about online. I had lectured him on how unhelpful and unsupportive his family had been already, and I had reminded him of how hard it was to submit supplemental evidence once one piece had been found to be insufficient. I had reminded him of the delays we has already suffered because of his stupid Pakistani marriage. I was livid and M was going to be the one to bear the brunt of it because it was he who had again trusted his parents' word in place of mine. Again it had cost us. I was mad, and I had no idea of the amount of time we were now going to have to wait.

I walked out of the consulate with our huge bag of irrelevant, useless proof along with our five pound waiver envelopes all worthless. The snow was piled high around us as we walked out to the car. Now, even I worried if the divorce was real, I mean, I only had one man's word, right?

The Interview

We waited for quite a while before being called and looked like a couple of crazies sitting there in the waiting room. I was wearing my new favorite outfit, business casual best, high heels included. I got a huge hug when I walked in. M looked relieved and nervous. He had bags under his eyes as if he had not slept for days. He held my hand tightly as we sat there waiting for them to call out number.

Consular interviews are made as stressful as possible. In Montreal, there are a series of about four windows on the left and eight on the right. They have separate windows for submitting documents and then windows for submitting payments. It has a similar feel as the Deparmtent of Motor Vehicles, only at least there when they call your number you can get everything done, exept your license picture. He was called to the left first, and then to the right and then to the left again to show the receipt from the right. It was all terribly efficient. When we were finally called in for the interview, there was a gray-haired and balding man who was in a separate room from us. We were separated by what I assume was bullet-proof glass and there was a tiny depository to place requested "evidence" through if asked.

The man's eyes were huge when he saw me. He knew about the blizzard and had all of the paperwork showing my home as more than 700 miles away. From his facial expression, he knew what I had gone through to get there. "You must be Mrs. M," he said. I found it hard to talk, but forced a smile and said yes. There was only one seat, so I stood at the far end of the room while M sat down to be interviewed. I nervously held onto my coats with both hands, and had my thick packets of paperwork and evidence held close to my body. M held a paper shopping bag with pictures and other evidence he had brought from home. (There is strict security at the consulates and "candidates" are not allowed to use any type of bag, but open shopping bags. . . .)

The interview was short the Consular Officer (CO) asked M about how we met and how long we dated before getting married. M's answer was incorrect and I, without blinking said, "Oh no it wasn't! You called me the first time on ****, but we didn't go out for three months after that. You kept standing me up!" The consular officer giggled and M nervously followed suit. I have to laugh when I think about it, because after that the officer did not ask any more relationship related questions.

One of the things about the interview that made me very angry was that the officer bluntly asked me why it was that I could no live in Canada, instead of the United States. While I understand that this may not seem offensive to someone reading the story, it really offended me. For one thing, why in the world should this guy infer that I should have to leave the country instead of applying for my husband to immigrate to my home? I was legally entitled to apply. Second, how was it any of his business? At least that was what I was thinking. I just replied, "I am a Spanish teacher. In the United States, teaching Spanish is a critical needs field, at least in my state it is. Here, French is the necessary second language and I don't speak French. It would be very hard for me to work here or even live here. Also, my whole family is in the states, and his is in Pakistan."

The CO left the window for what seemed like forever. When he returned, he pulled out that hideous piece of paper that M had gotten from his parents. The officer said, "Where did you get this document." M told him about his attorney in Pakistan and his parents sending it from there.

"Well," said the man, "this is not what we are used to seeing from Pakistan. It is possible that this is valid, but we are not experts on Pakistani documents, so we wil be sending it to Islamabad for review."

Around me were a few tractor trailer trucks and a few pickups. Most of the pickups appeared to be government vehicles with orange lights on top. There were no more snow plows and the snow was coming down hard enough that it was difficult to see. As I drove I began to feel the car sliding intermittantly and it really did worry me. I was driving slowly, but it was becoming obvious that this was not enough. And then it happened, I felt the car start to spin. It was one of those moments that you try to remember everything that anyone has ever told you about defensive driving. I was repeating advice in my head frantically. I had just looked in my rear-view mirror and seen headlights behind me. . .big headlights.

The car came to a rest covering three-quarters of the two open lanes and I saw the headlights getting closer and closer, but I was unable to move. Like a miracle, the truck stopped just short of my car and gave me a moment to drive my car back to the right direction. The emotional damage was done and my heart was beating very quickly. I had two more spin-outs before I was able to find a hotel. I was on the phone with M crying. I was promising that I would get up early in the morning. I was less than two hours short of Montreal, but there was no way to make it that night. M was despondent and I knew that there was no way he was going to that interview if I didn't make it to Montreal in the morning.

I set my clock for 3:30 the next morning, and went to bed, it was impossible to sleep.

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The next morning it was dark when I woke up. I had not packed a lot of my toiletries for the trip because I had duplicates of everything I needed at M's house in Montreal. I went down to the front desk and managed to procure toothpaste and men's deodorant. (As an aside, it is amazing the difference there is between men's and women's scents. I felt like I could smell myself for the whole morning after putting that stuff on!) I had been planning what I would wear to this interview for months. That sounds really silly even typing it now, but I had my outfit picked and planned to look amazing.

One of the things that always scare people about these interviews is the fact that the consular officer has an amazing amount of power over your life when you present yourself for one of these immigration interviews. They have the power to declare your marriage "fake," they have the power to slow things down terribly. I wanted there to be no doubt in this guy's mind that we were the real deal. That part of the interview would turn out to be the least of our worries.

I got in my car and got on the road. What a difference a few hours had made! I must say that the people who take care of the roads in New York mean business! The roads were as if it had never snowed. The only proof was the three feet lining each side of the road. I had no problem making it to the embassy only thirty minutes late for the scheduled interview. Lucky for me, the interviews NEVER happen at their scheduled time and I was more than two hours early. The look on M's face when I walked in was another moment I will never forget.

Memory Lane

I've been asked over and over why I didn't "cut and run" when everything started happening. . .why I didn't just give up. I would sit and remember things we did together before things happened in Pakistan. For example, we went through this phase where M would randomly pull a "movie moment."

One of our movie moments came when I visited M at work. It was raining very hard and I had just gotten off work. I changed out of my uniform and into regular clothes. I went to say hi and M was really excited to walk me out to my car. It was funny to see the expression on his face as he walked me out. I was trying to run to my car but he pulled me back to him. We're standing in the pouring rain when he pulled me close and kissed me. I could feel the rush even past the cold water running through my hair and drenching my clothes. Hundreds of memories (a little less cheesy than that) kept me waiting for him to return.