The boys’ renewals were easy, the same as Patrick’s and mine had always been. When I clicked the new-passport-application link, it took me to a page I hadn’t seen before, a single-line questionnaire: Is the applicant male or female?

I glanced over at Sonia, playing with a set of colored blocks on the carpet in my makeshift home office, and checked the box marked female.

“Red!” she yelped, looking up at the screen.

“Yes, honey,” I said. “Red. Very good. Or?”

“Scarlet!”

“Even better.”

Without prompting, she went on. “Crimson! Cherry!”

“You got it, baby. Keep up the good work,” I said, patting her and tossing another set of blocks onto the carpet. “Try the blue ones now.”

Back at my computer, I realized Sonia was right the first time. The screen was just red. Red as fucking blood.

Please contact us at the number below. Alternatively, you can send us an e-mail at applications.state.gov. Thank you!

I tried the number a dozen times before resorting to e-mail, and then I waited a dozen days before receiving a response. Or a sort of response. A week and a half later, the message in my in-box instructed me to visit my local passport application center.

“Help you, ma’am?” the clerk said when I showed up with Sonia’s birth certificate.

“You can if you do passport applications.” I shoved the paperwork through the slot in the plexiglass screen.

The clerk, who looked all of nineteen, snatched it up and told me to wait. “Oh,” he said, scurrying back to the window, “I’ll need your passport for a minute. Just to make a copy.”

Sonia’s passport would take a few weeks, I was told. What I was not told was that my passport had been invalidated.

I found that out much later. And Sonia never got her passport.

At the beginning, a few people managed to get out. Some crossed the border into Canada; others left on boats for Cuba, Mexico, the islands. It didn’t take long for the authorities to set up checkpoints, and the wall separating Southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas from Mexico itself had already been built, so the egress stopped fairly quickly.

“We can’t have our citizens, our families, our mothers and fathers, fleeing,” the president said in one of his early addresses.

I still think we could have made it if it had been only Patrick and me. But with four kids, one who didn’t know enough not to bounce in her car seat and chirp “Canada!” to the border guards—no way.

So I’m not feeling fancy tonight, not after thinking about how easily they kept us prisoners in our own country, not after Patrick took me in his arms and told me to try not to dwell on what used to be.

Used to.