Backstory Postponed...

I have been trying for the better part of the night to conjure up the humor to continue with part 12 of my back story. Unfortunately however even though the story is from memory, I cannot really find my sense of humor very easily tonight. Not enough to make a silly mistake in my life seem funny at any rate. This isn't a very good week for me, and it's been a July tradition of mine since 2007. My oldest son Joshua turned 12 on Wednesday, and he also shares his birthday with my mother who I did at least get to see this year. But I haven't seen my oldest boy and five years, and it makes the days from July 15 to sometime in the late 20s pretty hard to deal with.

Because of bureaucratic snafus on both the US and Costa Rican ends of the immigration spectrum, my residency here has been in a state of limbo. Even though I have three children here with my fiancée (my youngest son and my twin girls), I have technically overstayed my tourist visa to the tune of about four years. In late 2007 just before my youngest boy was born, a new law was passed that stated anyone who stayed past the 90 day tourist visa would have to pay $100 per day that they have overstayed as well as be banned from reentering the country for 5-10 years. This was focused mostly towards American ex-pats out of anger for Bush inflicting the new CAFTA treaty upon them despite their declared neutral status.

At the time I was taking care of a pregnant fiancée and her three-year-old son (the greatest stepson a man could ever want) and I obviously didn't have 5000+ dollars and five years to be away from my new family. So I got what I thought at the time was a decent lawyer and we worked out the details for my residency and eventual citizenship here. But I was not to leave the country until that was squared away, otherwise I would face a fine and the deportation without any way of defending myself. Here in Latin America, they don't follow the English common law like most English-speaking nations do. They follow the Napoleonic code, and that usually means guilty until presumed innocent if you tick them off bad enough. So I didn't have a choice, I had to wait out whatever bureaucratic process was laid before me before I could ever think of leaving and being able to return again.

It has been four years since we hired that incompetent lawyer. And in that four years I've seen the man maybe six times and have had to sign three papers. The last time I saw him was about two weeks ago when Paty and I went into San Jose, and as always, he claimed progress but that we still had time to wait for the courts to work there snail paced magic.

I missed everything from HERE..

During this time, I have tried to stay as close to my son as possible through the Internet and over the phone. But five years is a long time. And I have listened to his voice go from sweet innocent little child, to a crackly voiced alpha male preteen but have never had the chance to hug him in that entire time. I have lost five of the most magical years of my child's life and I will never get them back. Because he is already an amazing person, he tells me all the time that he forgives me and that he understands why I have had to stay. He knows that to leave would be essentially abandoning people who depend on me, and that's not what a man does.

to HERE

I take comfort in knowing that he has a very happy life with his mother, stepfather, and four brothers. And you never catch him in a bad mood, and he is just plain naturally happy. That takes away from the sting a little bit, but during this week as with the last for July's everything just piles on emotionally.

So I can't comfortably tell a funny story about my life this Friday. Because this week, as far as I'm concerned, any event that happened to me here, was just time that I should've been spending with Joshua... I'll be better next week, and I thank you all for your patience,