Pending…

I was prepping dinner when Denise came into the kitchen and asked, “Have you heard anything about your residency?”

“No, why?” I said, without thinking.

“Oh, I was just wondering because I haven’t heard anything about mine.”

I went back to chopping the shallots. That’s when it hit me.

We file separately. On paper, hers is hers and mine is mine. In practice, I run the process. I read the requirements. I upload my documents and tell her which ones she needs to upload. I make sure we’re compliant. She executes. It works.

So when she asked about mine, I heard something else.

If mine hasn’t moved, maybe hers hasn’t either. And if she’s asking about mine, she’s really asking about hers. And if she is asking about hers, then she is worried about hers. And if she is worried about hers, then it is my fault.

That entire chain of reasoning took about three seconds. It always does. The first hit doesn’t hurt. It’s the delayed reaction.

And then I started replaying March in my head. The submissions. The confirmations. The polite follow-ups when our renewal was due. The long stretches of nothing.

Here we were in July and that silence is not neutral when you believe you’re responsible.

This had gone smoothly the previous year. We submitted our residency paperwork in early March since it was due at the end of April. By the second week of May, it was done. Fast by French standards. It was easy. Our rural Loire Valley department is hardly overrun with immigrants. Castles maybe, but our largest city only has 41,000 people.

But this year, something felt different. I assumed the workload wasn’t the issue, this had to be a French thing. I had heard the stories.

There is a folklore about French bureaucracy. Nightmare tales. Files lost. Delays. Shrugs. Denials for no reason. The prefecture vortex. Maybe it was our turn to enjoy it.

Residency renewals in France are issued for twelve months. After several follow-ups, we were granted an attestation de prolongation, a temporary extension for three months authorizing our presence while the application was still being processed. Which is a polite way of saying nothing had happened yet.

By January, it was clear the file was not moving. I reached out to ANTS, the French portal for residency, again. Surely there was a way to move this forward. Magically, I finally received a response. It was polite and brief, but different in tone. There was nothing more they could do. The matter now rested with the department. They were throwing their hands in the air and pointing at Blois, our prefecture (the French version of a county seat).

This response changed everything.

I read that several times before it settled in. I had always known the prefecture was involved in some way. In France, there is always a prefecture somewhere in the story. But in my mind, ANTS was the authority. That was the engine. That was where decisions were made. That’s why I kept writing to them, assuming motion could be generated from that direction. Now I understood something I hadn’t before. ANTS wasn’t the decision-maker. It was a portal. An interface. A doorway you passed through on the way to somewhere else.

Which meant the file wasn’t stalled in some distant national system. It was sitting somewhere inside our small prefecture building in Blois. If nothing was happening, that was where nothing was happening.

That meant we were going to have to go there, and I may have to negotiate, in French. I speak enough French to order dinner, argue gently about a plumbing invoice, and compliment someone’s dog. Immigration status requires a slightly different vocabulary.

And as I let that sink in, I realized this wasn’t simply an administrative inconvenience anymore. Our temporary prolongation had expired in September. On paper, we were existing in between categories. No one had denied us. No one had approved us. We were simply pending. You don’t leave the country in that situation, because you might not get back in.

As the weeks had passed without movement, the mind did what it always does when faced with silence. It began looking for explanation.

At first, the explanations were practical. France had been discussing changes to residency requirements. Language tests. Civic expectations. Adjustments that sounded reasonable enough in theory. But we had submitted our renewal in March of 2025. If policies were shifting midstream, were renewals quietly paused while the new rules settled?

That felt plausible.

Then there was Denise’s work. When we moved to France, it was on a VLS-TS visa, essentially a retirement visa. You sign a document swearing you will not work in France or take a position that could otherwise belong to a French citizen. That was clear. Denise still worked with American clients remotely. Everything was declared. Everything was transparent. But transparency does not eliminate interpretation. Had something in our file raised a question? Had a line been read differently this year than last?

That, too, felt plausible.

I had launched We Got Frenched. I had published a book about moving to France. My sales were in the United States, of course. Why would a French citizen need a guide on how to move to France? Still, visibility changes the temperature of things. Perhaps being visible meant being scrutinized. Perhaps someone had searched my name and decided it warranted a closer look.

At some point, the explanations drifted into territory that I would have dismissed under normal circumstances. International politics. Headlines. The fact that we were American in a year when that carried its own volume. A handshake replayed on French television. A lawsuit discussed at cafés. The idea that somewhere, in some office, someone might view our file through a lens far more skeptical than it deserved.

It was at this stage that we would occasionally look at each other and say, almost sheepishly, “Do you think it’s because we’re American?” The question would hang there for a moment before we dismissed it. “No way,” we’d say. “That can’t be it.” And yet the fact that we had asked at all told us something about how long the silence had been stretching.

None of these theories lasted long on their own. They rotated. Each one taking a turn in the foreground before giving way to the next. Under normal circumstances, we would have laughed at ourselves for even entertaining them. But uncertainty, especially when it is tied to where you live, has a way of dressing itself up as due diligence.

I didn’t like this at all. I told myself I would handle it. I would go to the prefecture and explain the situation calmly. I would be measured and clear and reasonable, in French. That was the plan I constructed for myself as if it were already decided.

That night, lying awake longer than I expected, I began rehearsing it in my head. The drive to Blois. The parking lot. The small ritual of presenting a story clear enough to pass through the first layer of bureaucracy at the entrance, where someone would decide whether you merited a number from the ticket machine. French is close enough to English to lull you into comfort and different enough to expose you the moment you relax. I knew how easily a misplaced word or an overly casual tone could shift a conversation without my even realizing it. I was not afraid of being told no. I was wary of saying something that quietly disqualified me before the conversation had even begun.

Then, the counter and the glass, the way these conversations always begin formally and then either soften or tighten depending on the first exchange. I imagined explaining our situation slowly, choosing my words with care, aware that immigration vocabulary does not live in the same neighborhood as market-day vocabulary. I pictured myself calm and respectful, nodding at the right moments, searching for the precise phrase that would keep things from drifting sideways. I also imagined being misunderstood, having to circle back and clarify, restating something I thought had already been clear. None of it felt impossible, but none of it felt light. This was no longer a portal or a tracking number. It was going to be a conversation, and the outcome of that conversation mattered more than I was comfortable admitting.

As the hours passed, the rehearsal narrowed. I stopped picturing the room and started constructing sentences out of the safest corners of my vocabulary. There is a stage in learning French when you realize that half of English is simply French wearing different clothes. Words ending in -able, -ent, -ant. Words that look almost identical on paper and feel almost familiar in the mouth if you are careful. I found myself building entire explanations out of those, leaning heavily on adjectives that resembled their English cousins and keeping the verbs as simple as possible. If I could stay within that band of language, perhaps I could remain coherent long enough to be understood. I imagined explaining that our renewal was en cours, that the situation was raisonnable, that we were simply seeking clarification acceptable to all parties. I was arranging the sentence before I knew what the response would be, trying to make sure I would not lose control of the conversation simply because I ran out of words.

Sometime around three in the morning, another thought surfaced with surprising clarity. There was no rule that said I had to do this alone.

Mervin. He had been our interpreter on two of France’s most confusing legal processes: closing on a 200-year-old property and setting up a French will. He had been in France for over 55 years. Surely, he could help us with this.

We picked up Mervin at 8:45am. Denise had been up since seven, which in our household signals that something matters. The last time she had been up at that hour voluntarily was landing on a red-eye at Charles de Gaulle. This was not a casual errand. Mervin came prepared. He knew the timeline of our submission, the follow-up emails, the silence that began in late summer, and the moment ANTS effectively stepped aside and directed us to the prefecture. He had the sequence organized in his head in a way that reassured me before we even reached Blois.

On the drive to Blois, he spoke easily about a church we passed, mentioning its century and the origin of its name as if he were commenting on the weather. He had degrees in French and German from Cambridge, and it showed. Words that I approached cautiously, he handled without effort. Listening to him, I was reminded that there are levels to language. I was operating at survival. He was at home.

The building itself was exactly what you would expect. Functional. Fluorescent. A quiet choreography of people holding folders and waiting for numbers to change on a screen. At the entrance stood the first layer I had rehearsed in the dark, a young man whose job was to determine whether your story qualified you for a ticket from the machine behind him. He appeared unimpressed by the urgency of anyone’s situation, which I suppose is a useful quality in that role.

Mervin stepped forward and began speaking in a tone that was both polite and immovable. There was a brief exchange, a couple of small exhalations from the clerk, a few syllables that rose and fell in a rhythm I could not quite track. Then Mervin turned back holding a slip of paper marked E 011. I glanced at the board. E 004 had just been called. We had time.

There were maybe fifteen people in the waiting room. It did not feel like a department drowning in applications from Americans like us. Whatever was holding up our file, it wasn’t a tidal wave. There had to be another reason for the delay, and I wasn’t sure I was ready for what that might be.

The screen advanced slowly. At one point the main clerk emerged from behind the glass with another couple, speaking rapidly as he guided them toward another corridor. On his way back he said something in our direction. I caught only the first two and last two words. Mervin answered immediately. “Non.” I asked what he had said. “He asked if we were here to register to vote.”

Finally, our number appeared.

All three of us approached the counter. The man waiting for us wore a navy sweater and a Parisian scarf tied with studied casualness. He asked for our cartes de séjour, our residency cards, and began typing. The typing became more forceful. His expression tightened slightly. I felt the old theories stir. Perhaps this was the moment one of them materialized into consequence.

He struck the keyboard one last time, huffed, got up from his chair and disappeared behind the wall.

Time stretches differently when you are the only people standing at a counter while everyone else waits for their number. Denise and I became aware of the room in a new way. We were now part of its delay. The screen did not advance. Conversations paused. I wondered, briefly, if this was the scene I had rehearsed, only less eloquent.

When he returned, his demeanor had shifted from agitation to routine. He asked if I had received an email. Of course I had received emails. None of them had resolved anything. That was why we were standing there.

“I have just sent one,” he said.

I checked my phone. There it was. Another temporary attestation extending our status for three months while they sorted the file.

Mervin spoke with him for another minute, clarifying what had happened. The explanation was simple. The woman handling our file no longer worked there. Our application had been sitting, unattended. No denial. No decision. No review. Just absence.

We thanked him. I smiled in the way that only Americans smile at the end of transactions and wished him a good day. As we stepped back into the hallway, the weight that had accumulated over months dissipated almost embarrassingly fast.

Nothing had been wrong. Our file had been sitting on a desk for six months because someone had left their job. It just sat there and no one noticed.