“I need some scissors, tape and a jet engine”

My middle son is a creator.  He spends most of his time making things – armour, costumes, computers…..you get the idea.  He loves cardboard boxes and paper and he spreads throughout whatever space he is in, usually the whole house.  In the mornings I spend about an hour just picking up bits and pieces from around the house and putting it in a pile for him to relocate to his room.  The title of this piece is a quotation from him when he was about 4.

Right now he’s not here, he’s been back in America for the last 3 weeks.  This means I have a lot more time on my hands because he’s not here to make a glorious mess.  So I have the time to tell our story.

When people ask my husband how we met, he always goes back to when I was born.  I teased him about this, because he could have just said “we met at camp.”  But it’s become an integral part of our current situation.

I was born in Pakistan, where my parents were missionaries.  My dad, a doctor, worked in a hospital as the pathologist. My mum was a nurse, and between looking after my brother, sister and myself, did some work in a local clinic.  My birth was registered with the British High Commission and I got a British passport. Technically I think I was named on my parents’ passport at the time, rather than having my own, but got one in my own right when I was 16.   We moved back to the UK permanently when I was 5, and carried on living our lives.

When I was 15 I went on holiday with my parents to Oregon, USA.  One of the other doctors from the hospital in Pakistan lived there, and we went to visit them.  I fell in love with Oregon – the forests, mountains, coast.  So four years later I went back on a summer exchange and worked on a camp for a few months.  And this time fell in love with the lifeguard.  It took a while…..but eventually we got married.  We lived in Illinois, in Texas and Georgia (got to love the army!), then moved back to Oregon when he got out of active duty.

There we lived for 15 years.  He was working as a physician assistant in orthopaedic surgery, and loved what he did.  9/11 took place not long after we moved there.  Apart from the obvious horror of that day and situation, we were concerned that my being born in Pakistan could be a problem as, although I had applied for a green card I had not yet had it granted.  It turns out we didn’t need to worry, and three months later we had the interview with no problems.

We adopted two children, then still in the aftermath of 9/11, his national guard army unit was called up to go to Afghanistan.  I decided I would spend a few months back in the UK with the two children, so that I could catch up with family and friends.  The day after he was notified of the deployment I discovered I was pregnant.  We chose to continue with the plans to come to the UK and have the baby here, so that I would have family around.

The deployment finished, he made it to the UK in time for the birth, and we travelled back to the USA when the baby was just 13 days old.  I seem to remember I was on a lot of drugs! Better living through chemistry.  There we lived for the next 9 years and got on with living our lives.

There was a PA conference in San Francisco in the May of 2015.  We decided to drive down as a family and have a holiday around the conference.  In one of the halls there was a jobs’ fair and he noticed a British flag, so went to talk to the people there.  If he could have written his dream job description, this is the one he would have written.  It sent us into turmoil.  He loved working with the doctor he was currently with, and we had no plans to move, but it was such a great opportunity. Plus, I’d been out of the UK for 19 years and really missed my family and friends there.  Six weeks later he was offered the job and we started the process of moving.

It’s not easy doing an international move for a family of five.  By this stage in life you have stuff.  Some of which you can part with easily, some you have to think about, some are not negotiable – like books, thousands of books, apparently are not negotiable.  For 9 months we planned and made decisions.  One of the main things to look into was visas, of course.  The hospital he was moving to did all the administration on their side for getting Patrick’s visa.  But there’s a really tight window of generating the visa request and starting work, so sorting out visas for the rest of us had to work around that.

I, of course, did not need a visa as I am British.  My youngest son, thankfully, was born in UK and has dual nationality, so also didn’t need a visa.  The other two, however, were tricky.  When Patrick was going to Afghanistan and I was coming to the UK I tried to get British passports for my two oldest as it would be easier for us all to be travelling on the same passports.  I filled out the entire form and got to the disclaimer “I certify that everything is true and correct blah blah blah….the children were not adopted outside the UK blah blah blah”.  It turns out I am British by descent not birth, and as such can’t pass my citizenship on to my children. Adopted children are also treated differently under the law than biological children. So two points against us.  At that point I left it, and just travelled on their American passports.  I had a lot of other things to think about, after all.

So last year, getting ready for this move, I read everything on the British embassy website about which visa to get for the boys.  That’s a blog post in itself.  But I couldn’t work it out, so I called the embassy helpline, which I had been resisting as you have to pay, £5 or so.  But, it’s worth it to get it right, I thought.

I explained that I was confused, was running short on time, and asked “can I just bring them in as tourists, as I have done many times before, and change their status when they get here?”.  The answer was an immediate “yes, of course”.  Hugely relieved, I put it all out of my mind.

Turns out it was completely the wrong advice, and is the source of all our current problems.

 

A bit of tonic:  as I’ve called this post GIN, after my favourite drink, I though I would add some tonic each time.  Today’s bit of tonic: I live about a mile from Cadbury World, and if ever I needed chocolate it is now!