Immigration (3 months old)

If you read my prior missive about becoming a U.S. citizen, you’ll know that even as a baby I’m already experienced with concerns of statehood. 

But I’m not the only one in the immigration pipeline. Today my mama attended an obligatory language test and interview to secure her French visa. 

The hardest part of the whole endeavor, she said, was being away from me for 5 hours. Oh, mama. 🙄

As the dark cracked open across the horizon, she drove the hour into Toulouse—but not before nursing me and setting me back down in my bassinet, perfectly asleep, next to papa. 

She could have let papa give me a bottle when I woke, but so heart-torn to leave was she, she took the opportunity to spend one last quarter-hour with me.

She said she really felt for mothers who had to return to work at three months (or less) — which is how old I am! — and was grateful she had the privilege and opportunity to not have to leave me most mornings.

I tried to tell her to remember that sentiment when, on said mornings, I spit up all over her just after she’s showered and changed into fresh clothes. She was too enamored with the smell of my head to hear me, though. 

So in she drove, barely passing the first test of finding parking, and took the language test. 
Ce n'était pas parfait, mais ce n'était pas mal. Or: “Not perfect, but not bad”

Then, she spent most of the time waiting for her interview in a bathroom stall pumping, squatting down over a plastic poche de lait looking at a-DOR-able pictures of me to stimulate milk flow. As you do. 

She also said she now understood the importance of public nursing and pumping facilities. 

And because my typing skills have a ways to go yet, with the remaining 10 minutes before her interview she wrote this post on my behalf. Thanks, mama!

That’s all it took, you see. 10 minutes that could have been squandered to instagram, instead flowed to recording a special moment in time.10 minutes used to be nothing to mama, the transition time between zoom calls or emails. But now, with me in her life, 10 minutes alone is a spacious midwestern prairie where horses of possibility run free. 

When her interview time came, the interviewee started with small talk: how did she like france? what were things she was learning as a new mother?

“je ne prendrai plus jamais 10 minutes pour acquises” she replied to the french bureacrat.

Or:  “I will never, ever, take 10 free minutes for granted again,”