“I don’t take life or anything in it lightly.” It has been my motto for years, ever since emotions engulfed me at the age of 13. It was the phase in which feeling led us to do everything, it woke us from our bed, made us sneak out of our parents windows, made us listen to the music of bitter relationships and obsession. I have always kept at least a part of me invested in that phase, deeply rooted in the notion that our emotions, our obsessions, our most innate feelings are inescapable because they are a part of your soul. A part of your purpose in life on this earth.
For as long as I can remember I have always wanted a family. Not the best family, not the most loving family, just anything but what I had. What I had was two divorced parents, each of them trying to reconstruct their lives from the ground up. I went to half a dozen schools due to custody battles, and eventually, the result of custodies were pendant on the mature decisions of a 5 and 8 year old. Oddly enough most of our choices on who would be a better parent laid heavily on the most recent toys or priveleges we received from parents. Thus the never ending custody battles ensued over my brother. I unfortunately was baggage for my brother attached to the moral rule of never separating the children.
My idea of family became an amorphous concept at an early age and I became immediately aware. The biggest blow to my loss in normalcy was the clear idea that I was the only kid with divorced parents in my class. When kids were drawing pictures of their families and their houses, I had two sheets of paper and I drew two families. Mom and Dad were never on the same page. Dad was always with a stick figure with a skirt with different color hair every time I would draw. Mom was always by herself with us. She didn’t have a house, so I drew her car, which also always changed. My second major clue that I was always moving. As a military child, it’s normal to be stationed in several states. Combine that with a mother who likes to move and two people who like nothing better than to win their children, we were on relocation overload. I never had a best friend until 3rd grade and that last 2 years. I don’t have any friends that date back more than 3 years due to this constant moving.
A few years when the dust settled from the War Over The Children, my brother and I were separated. I lived with my mother and went to school in Willingboro NJ, where I planned to make lifelong friends and adjust to my mother’s new boyfriend and his daughter. I would have a family and although absent of my brother I had a female substitution in his place. This was also invaluable to me because I would be living with a mother, a father figure and a sibling. In a house. With a real yard. A real address. I began rooting immediately.
I was not exactly welcome. A regrettably ugly and smart child, I did not make friends easily. In fact, I couldn’t’ make real friends at all until high school. Coincidentally, that’s when I fell in love. His name was Andrew and he would make a huge impact on my life for the next six years. Shy at first, he let me feel stable. My home life had proven to be not a family, but another war zone. My step father became abusive and addicted to drugs, he estranged himself from all things of and resembling a family. My sister sought adventure and I weighed her down by being younger and less attractive. My mother threw herself into work, and spent her free time saving face in front of other moms in the neighborhood. My family was in pieces again. But there was Andrew. He came from an equally, for lack of a better term, fucked up household as well. We were in love. We stayed together throughout high school, with no breaks, no huge fights in the halls, no teenage lapses of judgement. We were just together, no matter what. He graduated a year early and moved to Brooklyn. I woke up at 5:30 every Saturday morning for a year to catch the trains to New York. When I graduated we lived together. When we got sick of New York, we moved. Together.
In Oregon, things became rocky and the lapses of judgement that we had not explored in high school made themselves ever present by the time Andrew decided to go to college. It was the phase I like to call College Douchebag phase, defined on exploiting the concept of being free, young, and attractive. I too, had explored it. My phase was over in 2 months. His? It may not ever be over yet. He occasionally returned to the same longing for stability that we had originally shared. He proposed to me. Followed by that were, 3 other girlfriends besides me who knew nothing about each other. Needless to say the engagement ended. My stability had ended and I was forced to rebuild.
I went back to New Jersey where I enrolled at Kean University. As always, I would be a theater major with a concentration in lighting design and I had decided that I was going to plant myself here for at least 3 years. I was going to make myself stable. In the meantime, men would be equated with the occasional meal, cup of coffee or movie. Until I met Shmustin.
Shmustin would be the most complex and fickle human being I had ever laid eyes on and had the mishap of dating. He proved to be extremely interested in me, unlike most people in this new school and I obliged him with small stories from my life. He also disclosed many feelings and anecdotes from his past relationships, each one, had I been listening carefully, disclosing why this was not the guy for me. Looking back now on the myriad relationships he had including both men and women, I should have not fell pray to the one thing that allured me about him the most: his family. His parents were married forever and he had two sisters. They lived in Jacksonville Florida and he visited them for the holidays. He loved them and talked to them on a pretty regular basis and I thought this guy is stable. This is what I need.
In hindsight, it took him 5 months of waiting to obtain the position of his girlfriend, he was frequently flirting with others in our department as well as friends of friends outside of the university, lost multiple jobs, and relied heavily on me for financial security. I became stability for him. This was obviously stressful and I felt like I had become his mother. However, every time I thought he was too much of a child, I would be rewarded greatly. Our relationship was punctuated with joint visits to his parents in Florida. We would sleep in the spare room they had. His mother would cook, his father would watch television. His sisters lived not too far away in the same city, one of which had two children and a husband of her own. Every visit to that particular sister resulted in a conversation of Shmustin not wanting to be married or have children. This idea changed frequently as well.
A year later, we were still together, but this was stability. There were semi annual breakups and arguments and difference in opinions but we always returned to one another. I, for the love that I lacked and the stability I didn’t want to admit I lacked, and him for the life that I provided him with: cooked meals, help with his homework, someone who admired him constantly, and would be there no matter what.
In the winter of 2010, our department began to work on the production Sweeney Todd. Shmustin was Assistant Stage Manager and was there from the beginning of rehearsals. As a lighting designer, I am not brought on board until the final few weeks before opening night. Preceding the project, I had been broken up with but we had agreed to steadily work on our relationship. As far as our behavior nothing had really changed. He was always at my house or vice versa. We spent time with mutual friends, we spent days together, we got along and for the most part we were perfectly comfortable being intimate. That is, until his birthday.
I had been brought on the show a few days prior and we started to work non stop. Shmustin and I barely had time together that week and he asked me if I would have lunch with him. I rejected him coldly but what I had planned had to be done on our lunch break. I had ordered a cake for him and needed to pick it up along with a card for the entire cast to sign. I did my best to conceal this plan from him and I started running errand. Luckily everything was done in time and I had a bleeding red velvet cake stabbed with a razor prepared for him by the time he would get back from lunch. However, I was missing a lot of cast members signatures. I called Shmustin thinking maybe he was eating with them. To my surprise, he was eating with a particular cast member. Alone. One whom he had hinted to me about before. He had texted me messages on accident that were meant to go to her late at night. I thought it mostly harmless until he guiltily admitted he was having lunch with her. I explained my hurt feelings and what followed were several falling outs that day. However, I happily greeted him later that night with a gory cake full of candles and a whole cast singing happy birthday.
He later apologized for everything and swore we would work on things exclusively. So we stayed near each other. We hung out, went to dinner, talked, slept together. I occasionally caught him lying about who he was speaking with, still received intermittent text messages intended for the leading female role of Sweeney Todd. I cried but hoped it was a phase.
It wasn’t.
The show ended and so did our relationship. We ended things harshly when I dropped by his house and “Johanna” was there. I cut off communication when I found out that he didn’t have just one infatuation but a few. I felt the pattern of infidelity forming. I decided to end things as quickly as they had began. I blocked his number and text messages. Just like that. Six weeks later it was April. I had been single and completely content with the idea that maybe I was not suited for relationships. Maybe I was supposed to be alone. For now. Or so I thought.
I called him that month composing myself and trying to hold back my tears. I failed to keep calm. He had been trying to contact me desperately for the past few weeks and I wanted nothing to do with him. In fact I could have let him go scott free. But this. This was too important to me to let it go. He needed to know. If he felt even a small portion of what I felt, he needed to know.
He reacted sympathetically but as I suspected, he thought it should bring us closer. That it would allow us to communicate again so we could relate to each other through our pain. I could not allow that. I hated him more for reaching out to me. I wanted him to suffer. Just the way I had to suffer through the cheating. The way I would suffer through this. The way I would fill out forms at the clinic. The way I would swallow this every time I listed the number of pregnancies as 1. The way I would list my number of children as 0. Alone.
I always remember him saying, “ I see myself as a father before a husband.” I hear it in my head and it turns my stomach. He would be neither in my eyes. It’s what haunts me to this day. This possibility of family. This feeling of being accompanied unknowingly with something that was us. The thought that we may have not even had the choice but to be a family. We would have been forever bound and obligated to one another for a lifetime. I was feeling deserted and alone, coping with this solitude and I wasn’t. For six weeks I wasn’t.
I see him now and remember the week it was conceived. He had slept with that girl in the same week. Moreover, he bragged about it with friends. I crumble when I think about how my future was pendant on this fickle excuse for a man. I wince at the possibility of what we may have had to do if our ‘family” had lasted longer. I shake my head reflecting on how I was almost a mother and he was infatuated with girls who held the same unpredictable and childish whims. Every time I hear Sweeney Todd play on my Ipod, I cry with the meaning the lyrics hold for me. I feel you, Johanna.
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