Being in love and separated by 7,000 miles, several mountain ranges, huge rivers, and an ocean isn’t easy. But somehow Fabrice and I make it work. We’re counting down the months until the US government will allow him to move to the US. Once he arrives, we must get married within 90 days. Since we don’t know when his visa will be approved, it makes planning a wedding a bit difficult!

But recently we learned some news that will turn our yearlong engagement into a very long engagement. Evidently the number of naturalization applications for the US has jumped from 1.2 million to 2.5 million in a single year. Are there really that many people who want to live in the US?!? Due to this massive inflow of applications, requests that normally take six months are now taking 16 to 18 months. And that’s just the time it takes for the government to look at our application. Once it’s been approved (who knows how long that takes), the application is then sent to the US visa office where they approve the visa. Then the visa office contacts the US Embassy in Paris. Fabrice will contacted by the Embassy for an appointment, and it usually takes another three months for that.

Sigh. It’s a long and complicated process, and unfortunately no one, including our lawyer, has any information on how long it really takes. When I delivered the news to Fabrice the day before his 22nd birthday, he was less than pleased.

As the clock ticked down the last seconds of 2007, I was on a plane somewhere between Portland and Paris. I wrote an article called No Where for New Year’s where I prophesized that I’d be spending a lot of time straddled between two countries. Be careful what you wish for my friends – you might actually get it and not necessarily in the form you might have hoped!

While 2007 was the year of faith and endurance, 2008 will be the year of patience – and a lot of frequent flier miles!

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