The Unforgivable Crime
I have committed the unforgivable crime. No, you’ll find no dead bodies buried under my floorboards, no hidden Swiss bank accounts referred to in cryptic numbers in a document buried in the “Soft-porn” folder on my harddrive. (I wish!) I am many things to many people, but…”I am not a crook!.”
No. In a life filled with all sorts of drama, I have never committed anything that might be considered criminal.
Or should I say, I’ve never been caught? ;)
But according to the Danish government, who has been monitoring my life since the tender age of 17, when I left my home and my sheltered upbringing for the shock of “real life”, I have, at least as they define the word, committed a crime, I have sinned against the status quo, I have dared to defy conventional wisdom.
What did I do?
I married for love, for the first time, and only after much painful soul-searching on my part, at the ripe old age of 37. That’s bad enough. Now, if he had been an Internet zillionaire, or insanely good-looking AND an Internet zillionaire, then maybe my country of origin might have forgiven me.
As it is, they probably never will. Because, you see…I married – oh, the sheer, utter horror! – a foreigner.
What that says about the state of Danish men is perhaps best left to the imagination, but screw it, I’ll say it anyway.
Reader, I tried. I dated the hopeless, fucked the careless, and dreamed impossible dreams of someone who made Casanova look happily monogamous. I went out with geeks, creeps, the curiously aesthetically challenged – to put it mildly – and others that could have been poster boys for the SS. I lived for over six years with the son of someone famous, and had a daughter with him, just to see if any stardust rubbed off. It didn’t, but eventually, the bruises faded. I even lived quite happily with an Inuit for five years. But no.
There was always some fatal flaw, some awful system error in their internal design, buried beneath millions of lines of indecipherable testosterone code, that wasn’t quite…precisely what I was looking for. And the Goddess only knows, that after seeing my mother go through three divorces by my 12th birthday, I sure as shinola wasn’t taking any chances with my own version of “happily ever after.”
So…
When Mr. Right turned out to be a helluva lot more than Mr. Right Here and Right Now, we said our “I do”s, never thinking that five years down the line, we’d be paying, in cash, in heartache, and in kind, a word that the Danish INS certainly has excluded from its vocabulary.
You see, they want to make sure that this marriage wasn’t forced, that I entered into it willingly, that I was present at the time, that I’m not about to import 50 of his closest relations so they can stick their metaphorical straws into the great bottomless Martini of the Danish welfare state.
I was even, as I recall, stone-cold sober when it happened!
Nothing doing. They’re not buying it.
“We’re not supposed to discriminate.”
“But it’s not like he’s some Afghani goatherder without a birth certificate!” I tried to protest.
“We’re not supposed to discriminate.” (Wash, rinse, lather and repeat. Ad nauseam!)
Therefore, in their infinite, and infinitely snide, smug, semi-Neo-Nazi wisdom, the Danish government has decreed that my American-born and bred husband can sit on his ass for over 10 months, and get paid for the privilege (although not much, they DO want to encourage people to work, right?) of having what should have been a simple residence/work visa processed, instead of allowing him to attend Danish classes, make contacts, apply for jobs, pay a whopping percentage of his income in taxes, and move on with his life, his ambitions, and the future he sees for his wife and their baby son.
Meanwhile, the Danish INS is under investigation for corruption and approving falsified documentation…some Chinese nationals apparently successfully bribed an INS official to have their applications processed in a blistering four hours. Noone found out about it until months after the fact. Now, the Danish INS are in deep, deep trouble.
Now, they are stating that in all likelihood, Hubby’s application will be denied, because they haven’t found it proved beyond reasonable doubt that I’ll be able to support him. (Never mind that he, perhaps, could support me and and buy the time for all those books I want to write.)
When all he wants to do is…learn the language, get a job, any job, even a garbageman job, and let his new, European life begin. It would be great, for instance, to be able to buy a bigger, newer bed that doesn’t creak ominously every time we breathe.
In my four years in the US, I noticed that I was considered a bit of a status symbol, simply for being “foreign”.
In Denmark, I am considered suspect, because no Danish man was quite good enough.
Apparently, even looking like an SS posterboy, an Aryan Thor come to life, isn’t enough anymore. Choosing Denmark over the US – which he did, and good riddance!, he says! – for our home isn’t good enough. Having a baby here isn’t good enough. We need a bank account to the tune of approx. 9000 US dollars.
But alas, we being poor…have only our dreams.
Dreams where neither of us – nor he, nor I – have to be ashamed of the countries we were born in, simply because of something so filthy as politics.
Maybe I should have been drunk at my wedding.
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