Annie Road is a patriotic wannabe American and illegal immigrant, who swears that bringing mayo-based potato salad to a picnic on a hot summer day was an act of foolishness, not terrorism.

My grandmother, with whom I am very close, is ill. She’s in her 90’s, so even if she wasn’t ill, the end of her life will not be too far from now. While sad, this isn’t startling news to anyone in my family. I should spend time with her before she passes. I should attend the funeral after she passes.

I won’t be doing this. I’ll be writing her a letter, telling her how much she means to me then hoping that her eyesight is good enough to read it and her brain is coherent enough that day to understand it. I’ll send flowers to her funeral, and hope that the florist doesn’t pick the straggliest bunch knowing that I won’t ever see it.

See, if I go back to my home country for any reason, I will be banned from re-entering the US for ten years. Once that ten years is passed, only then I may begin resubmitting my paperwork. It took two years before I was allowed to come into the US even with no black marks on my record the first time, so let’s say a banishment of 12 years total. The crime that would net me this ban is simply going to a dying loved one to say goodbye. How terrible of me.

If I do choose to pay my respects, the ban would mean that I wouldn’t have any further hand in raising my stepson. He lives with us, and unless he’d be willing to make regular treks of thousands of miles, I’d be out of luck. He’s sixteen now, so I’d return to regularly scheduled motherhood sometime around his 28th birthday.

It would be worse for my daughter. She’s ten, and while she would be staying with me, she would be saying goodbye to her whole life down here– her brother, her school, her dog, her dad. By the time she’d be allowed back, the dogs would have long since passed away and her friends would have moved on with lives of their own. In the meantime, she would be thrown into a whole new life with new rules, new cultural norms and new people and expected simply to cope. When she sees daddy again, she could legally go out for a beer with him to catch up.

As for my husband? Well, he wouldn’t be my husband anymore. A decade is a long time to wait to return to normal life. I love him, and cannot expect him to endure loneliness and hardship while we both hope that we don’t become total strangers during our separate lives.

I know, I know. I sound like a big whiner. You’d think that if my family means so much to me, that I should have filed the paperwork correctly so that I wouldn’t have to deal with this. Here’s the kicker, y’all: I did. I filed everything perfectly. I paid my fees, filled all the appropriate forms, and sent them to the center serving my area. I called one day to find out whether or not my paperwork had been approved, and after 45 minutes on hold, a lady came on the line to tell me that there was no record of me. She tried last name, SSN, and A-number only to confirm that I don’t currently exist and that I never have existed.

Due to clerical error, or maybe just someone going on break without hitting ‘save’, Im no longer one of the “good” immigrants. I’m an illegal.

The word ‘illegal’, though nothing I wanted, doesn’t bother me too much even with all of it’s nasty, America-hatin’ connotations. The fact that we have paid thousands to get me to the same point as I would have gotten by just running across the border in the dead of night bothers me a little more, but still not as much as you’d think. Even people like Kansas State Rep. Peck and his comment that people like me and my daughter should be shot from helicopters like feral hogs don’t truly get to me. I can chalk all of that up to “life’s not fair” or “sticks and stones”. Nothing more, nothing less.

My grandmother upsets me though. Barring a miracle, I won’t get to say goodbye except on paper. The fact that I had to celebrate my sister’s pregnancy and the birth of her son over the phone bothers me. The fact that my kids cannot go to my parents’ home for Christmas bothers me, as does the fact that they only know their cousin through Skype. It’s awful to have to choose between the family I’m raising and the one that raised me, all because of….. I don’t even know. And maybe not knowing what I did to cause my situation yet understanding the fallout so clearly is what hurts the most about it.

Just for fun, and because I have a somewhat morbid sense of humor, I looked up other crimes to see what length of prison sentences were like in comparison to the possibility of my ten year “no family/home/familiarity for you!’ ban.

The first site I found was written in 2008 in Connecticut and features a nice little table that tells me who I am worse than and who I am better than, if punitive time in prison can somehow be equated to punitive time in banishment and also if the sentences reflect the seriousness of crimes against society. It’s totally unscientific and has a lot of suppositions, but it’s food for thought.

Anyway, if you’re willing to grant me my two suppositions for the sake of argument, I am not as evil as someone who commits a felony murder. I am, however, possibly twice as evil as someone who commits first degree manslaughter with a firearm which carries a minimum sentence of 5 years.

Other crimes that carry mandatory minimum punishments of ten years or less include kidnapping, home invasion, 1st degree sexual assault, assault of a pregnant woman resulting in termination of pregnancy, employing a minor in an obscene performance, robbery, importing child pornography, computer crime in furtherance of terrorism, contaminating public food or water for terrorism, selling or transporting an assault weapon, manufacture of heroin/crack/cocaine/methadone, carjacking and the list goes on and on.

My ha-has turned into horror when I saw the company I am thought to keep, as far as criminal misdeeds go. Really, is my crime of someone else losing my papers as bad as beating a pregnant woman so badly she miscarries? Or poisoning a town’s water supply in an act of terrorism? Or making kiddie porn?

Good Lord. This is insane.