It was a long journey; not because of the time it takes to become a Citizen but the time it took for me to make the decision. My (now departed) mother-in-law frequently mentioned that I should become a citizen and couldn’t or wouldn’t understand why I did not. But if you have never lived in another country you do not realize what it means to relinquish the Citizenship of your birth and take on a new one. Yes the United States of America is a great country but that doesn’t mean you are going to drop your birth country without a second thought.
I first became eligible to apply for US Citizenship in 2000. At some point I even filled out the forms but that was as far as I got – mostly completed forms. And then in December 2005 we moved – to Canada. A whole new set of paperwork and form filling. At least this time we were all foreigners. While we were there my son and I became Canadian Citizens. I remember not feeling much emotion about it as I was mainly doing it to give our son choices. He really hadn’t had any choice in moving to Canada so it seemed only right that he should have the opportunity to stay if he wanted.
It would have been so much easier if I had become a US Citizen when I had had the opportunity because when we decided to move back to the United States we had to go through the Green Card application all over again. Costing us time and money. It took about 4 ½ months to get the visa, which was quick, but there was the cost of the application plus the cost of travelling to Montreal for the interview as well as having to take time off work.
Having moved back to the United States I was eligible to apply for Citizenship in 2015 but even with the incentive of being able to vote in a Federal election, I still put it off. It took me most of 2016 to fill in the forms. What finally prompted me to complete the process was that fees were increasing at the end of the year and the forms had changed so I had to redo them. I decided that this was going to keep on happening and that there was really no reason not to become a Citizen.
And that’s the thing. There’s no reason not to become a Citizen and plenty of reasons to become a Citizen. But it was still a HUGE deal. I’m not going to go into a long story about by interview. Briefly, the notice said to allow two hours. A friend drove me as husband was away and she didn’t even have a chance to get her knitting out as I was gone for about 15 minutes. It did mean we had the rest of the morning for knitting at Starbucks.
Conversely the notice for the Oath ceremony gave no information. There was a lot of waiting in line and people taking the oath were separate from their friends and family. So you were sitting with complete strangers with one thing in common – today was the day you became US Citizens. The oath is a very serious affair and afterwards I cried, not because I was now an American but because I had renounced the country of my birth, the country I had grown up in, gone to school, established a career, met my husband; where my family still lived. I also felt a sense of relief that I have the right to remain in this country.
Here are some photos of the day. I was sitting in the last row of people, there was no choice where you could sit but this turned out very well as I was not lost in the crowd. Because of where I was sitting, I was one of the last to get my certificate, this meant that I could see and be seen when I exited the hall. As you can see I was very happy to show off my Certificate of Naturalization. (The long piece of paper in my hand is a voter registration form.)
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