Debt Deportation - Part 1

 The husband has had a fear of prisons his entire life.  Growing up as the son of a Japanese internment camp survivor (research), his parents cautioned, "If it happened before, it can happen again."  Husband went to law school after the Peace Corps and interned with Amnesty International.  Saw first-hand the devastation of deportation and is accused of paranoia by his family.

Some of what he's been through has affected his health.  Nevertheless, within every paranoid delusion is a thread of truth.  He knows there are truly ____ people snatched from their families' arms and permanently flung into cultures they do not understand.  He knows the US debt load demands $240,000 from each adult and child to be paid and history has shown that creditors eventually demand collateral rather than cash.

The wife was born in the United States but grew up in a fundamentalist Christian community in Wisconsin.  "Owe no man anything except a debt of love," might has well have been tattooed on her forehead.  She had no opportunity to rack up debt because of her sheltered childhood.  College was an extension of fundamentalist community, though the institution closed between her graduation and her wedding day.  She joined the Peace Corps after college to get away from the controlling ideology of her subculture.  Overseas service was the only way to live beyond the reach of a national network of synods.  If her mother was worried, total strangers would show up with peer pressure and stalking ability to allay concerns.

They met in the Peace Corps and stayed in touch.  Striving was tied to different motivations for each of them and career ambitions superseded any romantic notions.  As soon as Peace Corps ended, he applied to law school and she to medical school.  An emergency medicine fellowship made more demands on her time and the isolation she pursued overseas was involuntarily stalking her at home.  Girlish notions of getting out of parental reach translated into adult avoidance of family.  First she was too busy to call or write because she was studying.  Then she was too busy because she was working.

Denominational ties weakened with each year and her flight from community resulted in an island of social awkwardness.  Social media and the dating scene were poor fits for her.  She tried but knew what she liked.  The number of selfies and volume of first person language were nauseating.  Into books and movies she delved.  Money stacked in her chosen field because childhood thrift and simple lifestyle demanded little.

When they reconnected, he was fighting a losing deportation battle.  Seeing a friend despondent bothered her caregiving sentiment.  She listened and waited as he struggled.  He knew he'd said too much; knew burdening her with his pain was unfair.  Yet she sat in the meditative silence that was second nature and waited for the avalanche of his emotions.   He continued to talk and she continued to listen.  Their friendship grew into his grateful courtship.  Love interests were scarce and career demands were myriad.  

Introductions to families were perfunctory because neither could explain to their kin what was really happening between them.  Marriage foisted them into North American consumerism, at first.  A mortgage was a must and upgrades of cars and furniture seemed better with credit card points.  He had debt from law school and she from medical school.  Before they knew it, they were just like everyone else: dreading Monday, sitting on the freeway to go and come, using retail therapy to escape.

Marrying him brought his friends into her life.  She got along with friends-in-law well enough, but the minefield of divorces and infidelity rubbed against her conservative morays.  Vacationing in exotic destinations was also his thing.  She came along but would have been fine at home with books and hot chocolate.  A few years of pursuing his ideas of success - she listened mostly - created a mountain of debt.  Then they received the tipping point in the mail.

SityMarket, holder of his student loan debt, sold his debt to Onondaga Holdings.  Instructions on payments, customer service and a new payment address rounded out the single sheet.  One page changed their lives.  He felt like he'd been sold on the open market, to the highest bidder.  Neither his old, nor his new, creditor cared how he felt.  Rather they cared about whether he was going to pay monthly.  First by check, then EFT each month, he nestled into a relationship with complete strangers.

She listened and watched mostly, though the stress of their lifestyles and student loans began to weary her.  Visits to her parents, and the growing gulf between her upbringing and lifestyle, sparked an awareness that she might not be able to stop working to care for them if she had to.  If they continued as they were going, she would have to work.  Before marriage, she chose to work and save aggressively.  Now their savings served as life support for their lifestyle.  If her parents pushed the button of depending on an adult child for support in their Golden Years, things would be tight.  

She felt obligated to care for her parents because of her upbringing.  While piety was prized in her childhood village, profit was a distant second.  God's provision was a lifelong plan her snarky classmates called dumb luck.  Either way, things had worked out for her parents.  As they grew older, their daughter being a physician and their son-in-law a lawyer was, in their eyes, God's provision.  She knew there was nothing they would refuse her and commensurate loyalty was woven in her fiber.  From the outside in, the couple's ability to carry the load seemed unquestionable.

Within the home, debt was winning.  

Pregnancy changed her from a listener and observer of friends-in-law to an ever strengthening mama bear.