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Wednesday, June 20, 2012
What's best for our kids and our country
Posted By Ailen Arreaza on Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 12:44 PM
Last week, as I nursed Pau with one hand and messed with my phone with the other, I was delighted to see my Facebook stream blowing up with President Obama's announcement that his administration will stop deporting young undocumented immigrants. As an immigrant who was brought to the U.S. by my parents when I was nine years old, this issue is particularly important to me. My family and I were lucky enough to never lose our status in this country and have now become American citizens; but that's all we were: lucky. We didn't do anything special, we didn't "stand in line" like the opponents of immigration reform so ignorantly suggest (there is no line, by the way), we were just fortunate to emigrate from Cuba and automatically receive political asylum when we entered the United States. But I wonder, would my parents have done the same thing if we had been born in Guatemala or El Salvador? Would they have brought my brother and I to this country even if a path to citizenship wasn't guaranteed?
Yes. If they believed that coming to the U.S. was the best thing for our future, then yes, I think they would have brought us no matter what.
And what about me? I've been thinking about this long and hard since Obama's announcement. What if my children were born in a place where they didn't have access to healthcare, where there was no chance for them to get a decent education, where I couldn't provide for them financially no matter how hard I tried? What if they were born in a place where they weren't free to speak their mind or vote in a democratic election? Would I bring them across the border? Would I come to the United States even if it meant living here under the threat of deportation?
Yes. Absolutely. I would do it too because I also want what's best for my kids, no matter what.
And the thing is, these kids are what's best for our country. These kids whose parents have sacrificed so much to bring them here are going to be willing to make sacrifices to stay here, whether it's by excelling in school or joining the army or contributing to the economy through hard work. These kids know how lucky they are to live here, not just abstractly, but because they have something else to compare it to. These kids love and are loyal to this country, not because of chance, but because of choice. And these kids would never, in a million years, heckle the president during a press conference.
All they needed was a chance and I'm so glad President Obama has given it to them.
Tuesday, June 12, 2012
And then, we were four...
Posted By Ailen Arreaza on Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 11:53 AM
The Stats
Paulo Ulises Arreaza was born on Thursday, June 7, 2012 at 10:22 a.m. He weighed 7 lbs 15 oz and measured 21.5 inches. We call him Pau.
The Details
I started having contractions sometime after midnight, but I'd been contracting on and off for days so I didn't make a big deal of it. I went to bed and tried to sleep through intermittent pain until around 4:30 a.m., when I realized the pain was consistent and coming every five minutes or so - it was time.
I woke up Tony, who woke up my mom and called his sister so that she could come stay with Luki. He also sent a few text messages to some key folks and, of course, updated his Facebook status.
We got to the hospital by 6 a.m. and the contractions were about three minutes apart. My nurse midwife checked my cervix and saw I was seven centimeters dilated. "Looks like you're going to have a baby this morning," she said. "You think he'll be here by noon?" I asked. "I think he'll be here by 10," she answered.
I labored quietly, with my eyes closed most of the time. I stayed in bed, despite being offered a Jacuzzi tub and a birthing ball and not being connected to an IV so that I could walk around if I wanted to. I just wanted to plow through the pain, I didn't want to think about ways to ease it. It was there, it was intense, and I just had to get through it.
At around 10 a.m., the midwife told me I was fully dilated. My water had not broken yet, but one big push took care of that. Three more big pushes, and he was here.
