Progress Report

I can only describe it as a calling – this invisible force pushing me to take our family away for a hiatus from “normal.” If it was just a whim, an idea…a fleeting thought, I would have reconsidered when the kids cried about leaving their friends (or I cried about leaving mine). I would have given up when our first rental house fell through, or when I looked around at the daunting piles in our current home. I would have worried about the potential negative effects on my career when my new boss – who didn’t know me or know that I don’t need to be in any particular location to get my job done – replaced my old boss who has known me since college and had already approved the move; the HR person who had given her blessing went on maternity leave so I also had to start that process with someone new. If I didn’t feel so strongly that this will be one of the best experiences of our lives, I would have let Ben’s bouts of cold feet, and the resulting grumpiness, sway me.

I’m not a flighty, spontaneous person. I’m not overly-adventurous. I would never bungee-jump or go shark diving. But I am invigorated – I feel alive – when I can be fully present with the sights, smells, and sounds of a place. A friend once asked why I was going to Africa when I could just go to Busch Gardens. It wasn’t enough for me to just see the wildebeest – I wanted to hear them, smell them, feel the force of their migration. I love to connect with the people, feel the music, soak up the weather, eat the food – just BE THERE, whether it’s San Miguel de Allende, or Fez, San Francisco, Killarney, Asheville, Ottawa, Boston, or the Serengeti. Lately I’ve been having a hard time with “being” where I am, because I’m so intent on getting to the next appointment, game, practice, or dealing with the next task on the list. I need to stop. And to just be.

Adlani wheeled his carry-on in while I was half-asleep and told me that he had started packing his clothes. I’m not sure what he’s planning to wear for the next month.

We have made a lot of progress, and this week brought several milestones. The lease on our house in Mexico is signed and the check is cashed. This was huge for me…it’s not easy to house-hunt from thousands of miles away, but I swear I keep getting little messages to help me keep the faith. When I was having a hard time finding the right house for us, I got an email from VRBO.com (vacation rentals by owner) with a subject line that read, “You only need one.” That’s right. Surely there is ONE house for us. And there is.

All of the doctors’ and dentists’ appointments are either complete or scheduled. Norah had her check-up with the endocrinologist – it has been almost 5 years since her thyroidectomy and she’s doing great. Ben is having eye surgery next week, but the recovery is supposed to be quick. I had my mammogram – one of my concerns (based on nothing but fear) was that they would find something that would keep us from going away, but I got the all-clear. One item that’s still on my list is to get our prescriptions-by-mail set up, but I’ve already looked into the mail service that will bring our mail from a forwarded address in Texas to SMA, including medications.

We’ve done a little shopping for things that would be difficult to buy in SMA – for some reason Aliya is not keen on buying bras at the weekly market. I also made sure everyone was set on shoes, because although I love a shopping challenge, I don’t want to spend days searching for Adlani’s next pair of sneakers. I will seriously miss having easy access to anything I could possibly want via Amazon Prime. Although we can order things if we need to, the cost of getting packages into Mexico can be pretty high. We’ll have plenty of visitors who can bring necessities, but one of the other goals of the next year is to be selective about what we acquire – to appreciate what we have and realize that we don’t need one in every color. We should be able to buy anything we really need locally.

And the biggest milestone of all – I renewed my passport which expires before we are planning to return, and we went to the Mexican Consulate to get our temporary resident visas! The consulate is in the Financial District in Boston. The applications were pretty straight-forward, and I printed off the 6 months of pay stubs that they needed to show economic solvency, as well as an agreement from my office giving me permission to work remotely. I brought the kids’ original birth certificates and our passports, and a second copy of each. And just in case, I brought statements for each of our bank and investment accounts. They require proof that you have either an income or savings. My paycheck should have been sufficient, but I like to plan for the unexpected.

I handed everything over at the window except the just-in-case bank paperwork, and about an hour later I was called in to see the consul. She said the words I was dreading, “You and the kids are all set, but there’s a problem with your husband’s visa.” She asked for our original marriage certificate, which I have been trying to get from Turks and Caicos for MONTHS. It didn’t arrive by mail after our destination wedding in 2001, and I haven’t needed it until now. As it turned out, since Turks and Caicos is not part of the Hague Convention, it wouldn’t have done any good anyway.

We had to provide 12 months of bank statements showing that Ben had at least $23,000 saved, so off he went in search of someplace to print the rest of the statements. When he came back, he was called in for a chat with the consul. At noon, about 2 hours after we first arrived at the consulate, we were told to come back before 3 to get our visas. Ben and Adlani went home, and I took the girls to lunch, dilly-dallied around for a while, and went back at 2:15.

At the window, the clerk said, “There’s a problem with your husband’s visa – we have not received clearance yet.” AAACH! She gave me the visas for the kids and me ($36 each), but we left without Ben’s passport or visa. On the drive home I kept thinking of the what-ifs, until I got another message from the voices in my head…”Worry is payment on a debt you may not owe.” When I tried to repeat it later to a friend, I couldn’t recall the exact saying, but at that moment it was loud and clear. Spooky!

At 6:30 that evening I got a call from the consul herself, to tell me that Ben’s visa was all set. She said that depending on the country of origin it can take a little longer. Since he’s from Morocco originally, they were obviously doing a thorough job of checking him out. I drove to Boston first-thing yesterday morning to get his visa, and the consul met me at the window. She pointed out that on his passport, his last name is separated into 2 words – his last name in Arabic means “son of _____” if you separate it…kind of like a name that was originally “de la _____” and came together as one word over the generations. As it turned out, because the name on his passport is not an exact match with the kids’ birth certificates, it was best that he ended up applying on his own.

Now that we have our visas in hand, it was time for me to officially notify the kids’ schools that they won’t be there for the next school year. I haven’t been keeping it a secret, but I wasn’t willing to relinquish our seats until we knew for sure that we’d be going away. When I went to school last week for the research fair, the secretary already had the forms prepared for me to get the kids’ records released, so she had obviously heard and was just waiting on me. It’s tough to leave two schools that we really love, but we hope there will be space when we come back for Norah to finish her elementary school career at Barbieri and for Adlani to start middle school at McAuliffe, while Aliya heads off to the high school.

There’s still lots to do, and I found out Thursday morning that I have a work commitment in Nashville on July 28th, so we are back to Plan A which is to arrive in SMA around August 1st. If anyone wants to go during the month of July, there’s a beautiful house sitting empty!