Paper Work

We are going to the Bahamas in November and for the past three months my husband has been hassling me to get our passport stuff taken care of. We are not cultured people and have never traveled outside of the country. Every week he says to me, "Hey! Don't forget about the passports" and I always reply, "Sure thing." Then I never do anything. I am a lazy piece of crap. If I fold one load of laundry in a day I feel like I've accomplished something. I was in my pajamas earlier when my husband told me we were going to Moe's for dinner and I went and put on a sports bra and pretended I was in work-out clothes. That's the caliber of person that my husband deals with.

I did pick up the passport applications yesterday and got the number to make our appointment. I sat at the kitchen table yesterday evening and filled them out. They want to know everything. I asked my husband, "Did your dad have a middle name?"
"I think so."
"What was it?"
"I don't know."
"How do you not know your dad's middle name?"
"Do you know YOUR dad's middle name?"
"Ummm....yes. That's a normal thing to know."

Thank God for ancestry.com. I've all his family's birth places and records saved. Once I finished filling out the applications I went to track down our birth certificates.

I went to the "file" where I've kept all of our paperwork from since we got married. There is so much of it. I have the record showing that he returned his kevlar in 2003, medical records, mortgage statements from 10 years ago. It's amazing how much you accumulate over time. I love going through it occasionally. Especially my medical records. "Wow! I was 19 and weighed 97 pounds! I must have been HAWT!"

I found the "certificate file." I swear to the Lord above that I have had so many bullshit hassles securing everyone's birth certificates.

Mine - So when I was 17 and needed to get a driver's license my family discovered that the name I have been using all my life is not my legal name and I had to have my name legally changed. My dad's name wasn't even on the original birth certificate. A big mess. Long story. Anyway, for some reason they would not send the corrected birth certificate via mail and it needed to be picked up. I guess because you couldn't just fill out forms online. It probably took 20 years or something to process it via mail.

My husband who was my boyfriend at the time was home on leave from the ARMY and my parents told us that we had to go to vital statistics in Wilmington, DE to go get it. We decided it would be fun. We would go pick up the birth certificate and do some tax-free shopping at the big mall there. It was a little over an hour drive.

We show up at the vital statics office and this rude-ass lady tells us that we need to go to the state office in Dover which was an hour south. So our 2 hour drive now is a 4 hour drive and essentially an all day event. This was in the days before GPS. We drove to Dover, got lost, drove down what seemed like a maze of one way streets before we found the office which was about to close.

I had no valid photo ID or any ID to speak of because I needed the birth certificate so I could get ID. They didn't want to give me the birth certificate. I cried and made a scene. Finally they relented. We got stuck in horrible traffic on the ride home. My parents were pissed off that I was 4 hours late coming home. I would have called but cell phones weren't exactly a thing back then either. It was just horrible. Every time I look at my birth certificate I shudder thinking of the day we drove aimlessly across the entire state of Delaware.

My husband - 2002. He's in Oklahoma. I'm in high school. It was April and we were getting married in June and he didn't have a birth certificate. We needed it for our marriage license or something. So I played hooky from school and went to the county building in Bridgeton, NJ to get his birth certificate. The lady told me I was in the wrong place and told me I needed to go to the Vineland, NJ county courthouse. Back in the days before smart phones and unlimited internet access you had to actually count on people to know what the f**k they were talking about.

I drove to the office in Vineland and lo and behold they didn't even have vital statistics there and they sent me back to Bridgeton but the building they sent me to was the social security administration and not vital statistics. It was a nightmare. I finally get to the right place and I tell the lady, "Hi! My fiance is in the ARMY and is stationed in Oklahoma. I need a copy of his birth certificate." I gave his name and birth date and they issued his birth certificate to me. I was pretty much was just some bum off the street who was not even related to him at all and they just handed over his birth certificate to me with no ID and without asking any questions. That's frightening.

When my youngest was born we had even more hassle because she was born at home and additional paperwork had to be done. When it was filed we were in the process of moving out of state but hadn't purchased a house yet and we moved before the birth certificate was sent. It was never forwarded. It was a bunch of BS to work through. Thankfully we were able to get that one through the mail.

Anyway, I tracked down all of our birth certificates and examined them. My husband's birth certificate is disintegrating. It looks like someone took a dump on it, ran it through the dishwasher and then dried it with a hair dryer.

For some reason my older daughter's certificate has my maiden name as my legal name on it. Our marriage certificate has my husband's age as 20 instead of 19. Some of my medical records from recently, like 09, have my marital status listed as single. I feel bad for my descendants who do genealogy research because our paperwork is all wrong. They will be very confused.

It is done now. The applications are done, the documentation has been gathered. We will have our appointment and picture next week and we will be done. They better take a good picture of me. I am excited to finally have a passport. Maybe we can pretend we have money and take more vacations out of the country. It would make the 30 hours of my life that I've wasted chasing birth certificates worth it.