No Room At The Inn

God damn us everyone.

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

This past Monday — Christmas Eve Eve — we finally got off our asses and to the United States Post Office to reup Donna Rose’s passport. Of course it’d been a year since we’d realized it was lapsed, and almost two months since we’d realized we might someday need to Get The Fuck Out in a hurry. We’d made one appointment already and realized half an hour after the appointed time that we’d biffed it.

We got to the appointment, stood at the counter, and “joked” with the post office ladies in stage whispers that we didn’t trust the next … administration. They were government worker ladies in Detroit. They were receptive, and snickered with me.

But in the time it took to get through our passport appointment, two Spanish-speaking families came in to get passports for their presumably American-born tiny babies. I paid enough attention to know they were two separate families; that they did not have appointments; that the post office lady told them she could not help them without an appointment. That one of the babies was named Donna or Dona.

Shy told me later that Donna or Dona’s parents had had an appointment for the past Friday, but that the passport lady was out sick that day. They had told the family to come back again Monday. All of this through a phone translator app. And here it was, Monday, and there was no room at the inn. They could not help that family, because they were too busy. Because it was Christmas.

Had I known — had I known — I would have changed my response from a loud but musing “if anybody needs a passport it’s that baby” to an extremely polite and pleasant but still loud “surely ma’am you can make time for the family that came for their appointment and was sent away, surely ma’am? Because it is Christmas!”

If anybody needs a passport, it is those babies. My family probably will not be prosecuted. We probably won’t have to flee.

Imagine being that father, those fathers, looking at your tiny American and knowing that within weeks it has been promised that your family will be ripped away from here, it has been promised it will be “bloody,” they are salivating right now to shovel the money at their friends who will set up the camps. And the only way your tiny American will have any claim to her birthright, perhaps her only asset, her citizenship, still for now the law of the land, is this post office lady, who will help you or not, but who has her own cares and worries and this baby, these babies, are at the back of the line.

Honestly, it was the day before Christmas Eve, and the post office didn’t even have a line.

I did not do what I should have. I didn’t pay close enough attention to the injustice of the missed appointment, and raise my voice louder, and beseechier, and use guilt and pleading. We could have got it done for one of the babies at least, the one whose parents had made their appointment like the rules say, the one who shares a name with my privileged daughter. I could have used my own privilege to stand behind them.

If anyone needs a passport, it’s that baby. Next time, I will be ready. If there is one.