Hi everyone!
My hubby and I got married in February 2017 and I have been a US permanent resident since November 2017. We lived in the US continuously from January 2017 to December 2020, so over 3 years and 10 months, but then because of the pandemic I lost my job and hubby's income wasn't enough to pay all our expenses so we were forced to move back to my home country (Italy) because we couldn't afford to pay rent and bills in the US anymore and we had no one who could help us or host us there. Our plan was to only stay out of the country for up to 6 months while working at our small online business to be able to make it into a full time income, but 20 days after we moved back to Italy I found out I was pregnant and things changed a lot. With the whole pandemic situation I really did not want to travel while pregnant, on top of the fact that i had a complicated pregnancy and was put on bed rest at 12 weeks, so going back to the US with no jobs and no insurance was out of the picture at that point. We decided to just stay here since I own an apartment in Rome and we don't have to pay for rent. We had our baby girl at the end of August and she is almost 5 months old now, we are doing good here, and as much as we really would like to go back to the US now that we have our business, we would have to start all over again and go back to pay rent which doesn't make sense for us.
So my question at this point is, since I did live for over 3 continuous years in the US, can I still apply for naturalization, or am I just going to lose my green card and the possibility to become a US citizen for as long as we are not able to go back to live in the US permanently? Am I going to have to restart the whole green card process from the beginning if we decide to move back when our daughter is older in a couple of years? We did register her at the US embassy, so she is both a US and Italian citizen and has two passports. We are still very tight to the US, we have family there, kept all our US bank accounts open, and we keep paying quarterly taxes to the IRS and filing for annual taxes since we have income from our business, which is registered in AZ. We would like to be able to go back to visit my husband's family for 3 to 4 months at the end of 2022 but I don't know if they are going to let me in the country at this point.
What do you suggest? How should I go about this? I can't afford to pay for a lawyer right now (having a baby is expensive so we need to keep expenses down as much as possible).
Thank you for your help!