This post is for me. I apologize if it reads more like a meltdown than a blog this time around, but sitting idly by has never been a strongpoint of mine, and writing makes me feel better. [Forewarning: we've been watching How I Met Your Mother lately, and Ted's narrative style seems to be seeping into my voice at the moment.] So, here it is, kids: the story of how I became a girl without a country.
For those who don't know the ins and outs of world travel, or the wonders (and horrors) of ex-patriotism, allow me to enlighten you. My whole life I have been the kind who would have looked at the world through rose-colored glasses if I had the choice. I would think better of people until I was forced to experience the worst they could give me. It's not that I'm naive, or that I mistakenly understand ignorance to be bliss, but I have a deeply rooted desire for things to be better than they often are. It makes me, probably, a bit of a Madame Bovary. Everyone hates Emma, don't they? She's impossible to satisfy, and destroys herself because of it. But I actually relate to her in some ways. I relate to her desire to dance away life in an impassioned world of Dukes and fine cloth. The thing is, I believe, somehow, in my own supposed illusions: I have faith in a Divine plan for this life I'm living, no matter how impossible it is to decipher what that plan may be right now. I'm not blind to the fact that I am blessed, that I am utterly loved and in love, and that many of the experiences I have had singing, acting, writing, and traveling have taken me places that some people would never understand or dream of going. The point is - I came to England with the widest, most optimistic eyes this world has ever seen. I wish I could see the security cameras from Manchester Airport when I stepped off of that plane and had done it - had packed my life into two giant suitcases, left my home, and moved to England, all by myself. I'd survived a destructive relationship that had left my soul pretty emaciated for a while, I'd thrived and got my bachelor degree in music, I'd sung with the finest academic choirs in the world, and there I was, stepping off of that plane and onto beautiful, English, early and sacred-music enriched soil. I was healthy, I was happy, I was passionate, I was devoted to my dreams. But they are doing their worst to crush that optimism. Whoever "they" are, they're trying to beat down those passions, my love of this country, my desire to make music here, my enthusiasm to build a life and a family here with my husband. And, I think, that's why this phase of my - now, our - life is especially trying right now. By the end of this I'll hopefully have arrived at a possible reason why.
When Andrew and I got married in December, we had a month until my student Visa was going to expire, and so I had to send my passport (and his) to the UK Border Agency a couple of days after our wedding, so that I could swap from the student category into a married visa category. Sending our passports off meant there could be no honeymoon, but having my family and friends around us in England, many visiting for the first time, we wouldn't have wanted to hop on a plane and leave them there anyway. So the plan was always to send off the passports, wait to get them back within 3-6 weeks, and then start planning a long-awaited and much-desired delayed honeymoon. Unfortunately, many more than 6 weeks passed and we heard nothing. For those of you who don't know the immigration system (or lack thereof) they make it virtually impossible to track down an application. They do not provide phone numbers or emails, or any direct lines of contact. Basically, your only option is to wait until you hear from them. So that's what we did, from January until the end of March, when one day we came home to find a large envelope from the UKBA on the mat in front of our door. Now, I've been through the process of applying for a Visa on three occasions, and it's always gone smoothly before, but when they've sent me my letters to confirm that all was well they always came in small, thin envelopes, so when I came home to a large envelope I was immediately concerned. The nerves about the weight of this application set in, and I instantly had a stomach ache, and my heart raced. The ink on the front of the envelope looked scribbled in such a way that it didn't set my mind at ease; whoever had penned my name on the front thought I was a fool. But I had to open it, and when I did I found my Notice of Decision from the Border Agency, which was not only that I had been denied a married visa, but that I had 12 days to leave the country or (thank God) file an Appeal with the Immigration and Asylum Tribunal. My initial reaction was calm, that it had to be a mistake, so it would all be ok, but one look at Andrew's face, completely deprived of color, and I sunk with worry and concern and love for my husband, who I'd just dragged with me into an absolute mess. But there wasn't time for wallowing. When you're told you have 12 days to either build the biggest case of your life or give up your life, those 12 days swirl into a storm. Our 12 days happened to fall before Easter, so while we should have been singing long-anticipated Alleluia's on our first married Easter Sunday, we were admittedly whimpering them. I almost forgot to mention: Our "12 days" did not actually allow for Bank Holiday considerations, and since ours fell on the Easter weekend, meaning there would be no mail from Friday to Monday, we actually had fewer than 8 to get all of the evidence we needed together. We did it, and then came expense number one: £140 to request an Appeal with the Immigration and Asylum Tribunal.
Before I go on it should be explained that the sole reason we have been denied this visa is purely financial. Despite paying them nearly £400 to process my application, this sect of the government, it seems, is incapable of working out self-employed income, and as musicians, much of our income comes in the form of performance. It's legitimate income, of course, and Andrew pays tax for his because of the nature of his work as a performer and private teacher. My visa, up until now, has restricted me to 20 hours of legal work per week while I was a postgraduate student, and I've not been able to legally self-employ in the UK, so everything I earn has had to be shared between us, which works fine because Andrew accompanies the lessons that I teach anyway and helps coach our students, so we happily share the income in his name - or, for all legal purposes, I donate my time and he gets paid. That being said, the government imposed a threshold of £18,600 in July of last year. Every couple applying for a married visa must make this between them in order to demonstrate that they can afford life in the UK without claiming benefits. We not only meet this threshold together, but exceed it by almost double. Still, however, the UKBA has mistakenly claimed that we do not meet that threshold. There is currently a massive debate going on within the government about the legality of this figure, by the way, and our lawyer has said that by the time we get to court next month it may no longer be law (it's that ridiculous, causing the destruction/separation of countless families. We take little comfort in knowing we're not alone, and count our blessings that we don't yet have children getting dragged into this.)
Now, back to our 12 (actually 8) days of Appeal prep. My first instinct was to make sure that even if we had messed up our calculations and didn't make the £18,600, that I could fix that so that now we did. I started calling and emailing all of my employers, essentially pleading for help. Help came from my part-time job employers at a small Yankee Candle shop in York. They gave me a raise and added hours to my contract so that even if my previous income hadn't been enough that I would now make the £1,000+ pounds per year that they said we were missing. This set my mind slightly at ease, and was deeply appreciated, but it turns out it still wasn't the answer, because the Appeal verdict (my lawyer has since explained) doesn't necessarily take into account whether your situation has improved since the time of your original application. If you have a kind Judge at your hearing then he may look ahead at your future prospects (mine include a lecturing job I've already been offered to teach a course on British WWI poets and songs at the University, and an offer to lead a weekly music workshop for children at a local school) and give you some benefit of the doubt, but there are many who won't. So, back to the drawing board. We decided the best way to validate our self-employed income was to go to our accountant, and have him verify our income for us, including the past three years, so that we could show that yes - while you obviously won't sing or play for the same choral society, wedding, or funeral every year - these kinds of gigs are still dependable, and always pop up when you need them, as evidenced over the years. Any musician will understand the way this works. And there we have it - Cost number two: £500.00 for the overnight preparation of our accounts.
With the accounts in hand, proving our income comfortably exceeds the threshold, we submitted my Appeal and felt confident about our case, and about the prospect of saving the money for a lawyer and representing ourselves. "How could we lose? We're right." But that's when the phone rang. Andrew grew up with another boy in Hexham, whose father, it turns out, is one of the top immigration judges in the country. He'd heard through the small town grapevine about our case, and wanted to help. "You are fools if you do this alone" he said. "This is not just some meeting. You're going into battle." Thank God that he called. We'd hoped, naively, that maybe he could be our judge and just get the mess taken care of, but instead he insisted it would be more helpful if he requested not to have our case so that there could be no claim of conflict of interest. We told him we couldn't afford a lawyer, to which he replied that it would be far cheaper to get a good lawyer than it would be to go it alone, lose, have to pay my flight home to America, I'd lose my job, we couldn't afford to keep renting our house, we'd have to pay Andrew's way across because we wouldn't be able to bear being apart, we'd have to pay to re-apply for the visa from outside of the country, and then, all being well, we'd have to pay for me to fly back across again. He started getting in touch with his friends, asking for favors, trying to help us. Thank God. The lawyer who will represent us in court has taken us on as a favor to this Judge, so is offering her time freely to us. She, in turn, got us connected with a friend of hers, who has just been awarded the UK's Immigration Lawyer of the Year from the government, and he's agreed to represent us for half price. A major blessing, for which we're immensely grateful, but still another £750.
I've mentioned, along the way, how the costs have kept adding up. It's also worth noting that every time we've had to mail anything we've had to have it signed for or recorded delivery - always the most expensive forms of posting, and we have had several now which total somewhere around £100 in mailing letters and documents back and forth to the UKBA.
The current episode: When we received our initial denial letter back in March, all of my application materials were thrown into the envelope, unsorted, and I thought it was odd that everything came back except my passport, our marriage certificate, and our initial application which had been refused. I've since worked out that they are witholding my passport and will not return it until a ruling has been made, which could be several more months from now. I was supposed to be doing an early music program with Andrew in France this summer, but I'm not able to leave the country while my passport is witheld by the government, so those invitations have gone out the door. Next time I see my passport, it will either come back with my married Visa if we've won, or come back alone if we've lost and I have to leave the country immediately. Anyway, I was instantly very/most concerned that our marriage certificate wasn't returned, so I rang every number I could find and finally got through to an official who explained that if I requested any of these documents back then my case would automatically be thrown out, and I would have to leave the country immediately and reapply from outside of the UK. When I asked if I could at least have some reassurance that my marriage certificate was being witheld, since I didn't see any reason for that being missing, the woman on the phone apologised and said there was no record that they had it. Our precious, months-old marriage certificate, signed by both of our mothers on one of the most beautiful days of our lives, was probably lost, or, as I saw it, stolen from us by a disastrous office. The kind woman on the phone (for once) gave me the postal address of the office in Sheffield that would have handled my application, and suggested that I start writing letters. So I did. Immediately.
I sent my first letter on the 8th of May, and heard nothing back until the middle of June, when, in some kind of miracle I got a second class package out of the blue containing our marriage certificate, along with a letter explaining that I should, also, have received a bundle containing all of the evidence the border agency was planning to use against us in court, including my initial application. However, that bundle never arrived. In fact, I'm certain it was never sent. You see, my letter was dated the 8th of May. In her letter the secretary confirmed that she had opened mine on the 28th of May, and that the bundle had miraculously been dispatched on the 8th of May, before she even received my letter requesting it....hmmm....Anyway, it goes without saying that I was skeptical it had been sent at all, furious that if it had been sent that such personal and financial account details were out floating somewhere and had been lost, and wondering what to do next. In her letter she said that if I hadn't received the bundle to let her know as soon as possible, and she was kind enough to give me a direct phone line to her. However, when I called the next working day, I received an answer from a male voice who laughed and informed me that she was now gone on leave, but that he could try to help in her stead. So my case passed on to him. Now, this was over a week ago, and I've been waiting for his phone call back since I explained everything and made a request for my original application. Until I receive that application back I can have no idea where their claims are coming from, or what we're fighting when we go into court - the uneasiness that lurks is distressing - did I somehow mess up and write the wrong figures in? Did I forget to include part of my or Andrew's income on the form? I can't imagine, in a million years, that I would not carefully check myself and be sure I wrote the correct figures in to add up to more than the threshold, but when you can't check you can only worry. I've done the math over and over again, and can not come to the figure they've provided. Anyway, I've been waiting more than a week to hear back from this guy. He's rung me twice on blocked numbers while I've been working and couldn't answer, and both times he's not left me a message or means of getting back in touch. Then, today I came home to another one of those all-too-familiar, dreaded envelopes. My stomach is getting used to sinking each time I see one. This time it was from him, and he wrote to tell me that he couldn't do anything to help, that he could see from my case file that my bundle had been sent, and he would not send another one, that I would get a copy of the bundle in court, and could then use it in my appeal if I so wished. Can I scream yet?
Because all of this isn't stressful enough, I've been quite humbly preparing the Doctoral thesis proposal of my dreams for the last several months, and in recent weeks I've been at the stage of beginning to ask funding questions. I knew I was too late for this year, because funding applications would have needed to be in right around the same time that I got my Visa refusal letter, and it pretty much squelched all of my best laid plans. My rather remarkable potential supervisor-to-be has been incredibly patient throughout all of this, though. We've met and phone conferenced together about the research I'm proposing, and he has expressed a desire to support this research with rather competitive and substantial funding. My first instinct, though, was still to prepare and apply for a Fulbright grant. My maternal grandfather was a Fulbright Scholar and I've dreamt for a long time that I might be able to carry on that legacy with my own PhD or DPhil. However, upon investigating the options available to me, I discovered that I am no longer eligible for Fulbright funding because I have lived in the UK for too long. *cue laughter* So, without completely sinking down, I looked up AHRC Funding, an even more generous grant-giving body in the EU, which funds Andrew's research and pays him a handsome stipend. Upon looking into their grants, however, I found that I have not lived here long enough to be eligible. That's when I sank. I am, truthfully, a girl without a country. My own says I've been gone too long, and the country I've adopted says I haven't been here long enough. I learned about Limbo and Purgatory for the first time when I was 14 in my high school freshman English class, but I never fully grasped why they belong in discussions of Hell until now, 11 years later, when I'm supposed to be basking in the bliss of my first year of marriage, and am instead fighting to have a place we can call home together.
...which is why I'm tired, and why I'm weary, and why it's getting harder to pretend to smile, and why I think I look really old when I look in the mirror. I hate fighting. I don't want to have to fight for every little or big thing any more. The fact that I have to fight just to get a day off from work before the day of the trial somehow becomes that much more ridiculous when you just want to scream, "why are you making me fight about something as small and inconsequential and ridiculous as this, too?!!!"
But then I talk to my father, and he reminds me before he goes to snuggle my napping mom that the demons who are attacking us have nothing more than earthly shit to fling. And when the path that God's preparing for me, and for my husband, and for us finally reveals itself....I have faith that it will become clear just why Satan is fighting so hard right now to keep us from reaching that Divine destination of ours. I think it's gonna be pretty good, guys. Stay posted.
