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For Francina Girard-Williams, my wife of 10 years, a proud native of the Caribbean island of Barbados, it was time to become an American.
After years of angst, indecision and rumination about what it means to be both American and Bajan - the term used for people from Barbados - this week Francina took, and passed, her naturalization test.
Now she's just a pledge away from becoming a naturalized citizen.
And although our family is happy about that, compromises had to be made.
For my wife, it meant diminishing somewhat her Caribbean nationality in the hope that becoming an American would give us more in common and bring more stability to our family.
For me it meant, at the very least, dispatching what I have known about Francina the person, and having the flexibility to understand that change was afoot.
It wasn't easy.
Mixed emotions
"The reality is, I'm no longer a Bajan citizen," my wife said, clutching her test results while leaving the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, at 16th and Callowhill streets, on Wednesday. "My birth certificate says I'm a citizen of Barbados, but I am no longer. It's a strange feeling, but a good strange, because I've been [in America] so long. It makes me official.
"I do have mixed emotions," Francina continued. "I'm happy, but I had to give up what I have known as my identity for so long."
That was the biggest hurdle for my wife - and, by extension, for her mother, our two small children and myself.
My wife said that thinking about our 7-year-old son, Jahfari, and our 3-year-old daughter, Selah, helped her make her decision.
"They were born American, not Caribbean, so it makes me closer to them now, by nationality," she said.
My wife has defended her birthplace and culture since leaving Barbados for Brooklyn in 1979. In that time, her pride in being a Bajan has only risen, thanks to the unique Caribbean-immigrant population in Brooklyn, where her mother still lives, and its communal vibe.
Culture shock
We met online, when she was a sophomore at Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa - from which she earned a bachelor's degree in studio art - and I was a junior at Temple.
We grew close after conversing online for a few semesters, and then Francina landed an internship at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The internship didn't pan out, partly due to a SEPTA strike, but we did manage to see more of each other. We were married on Nov. 30, 1998, by Senior Judge L.M. Goldblatt of the Third Judicial District in Sioux City. She was 22; I was 24.
If moving from Barbados to the U.S. was a culture shock, nothing can quite compare with being from Barbados and completing her secondary education in America's heartland, surrounded by folks with whom she had absolutely nothing in common.
I had consistently argued that my wife should embrace her Caribbean nationality, maintaining that she had done well enough getting through college and raising our children to not have to become an American citizen. I wasn't being unpatriotic; I thought it would strip away a little bit of her makeup as a person.
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