Heart Scars

by Jeanette Lukowski

  Technically I live with my two teenage children, but I feel like I live alone.

  We have two television sets in our house—one upstairs, in the living room, the other downstairs, in the family room. The only time I get to decide what television program to watch is when the children are sleeping or away. Otherwise, one child is upstairs, holding tightly to the remote control, while the other child is downstairs in the cold basement, huddled under a blanket, watching the television.

  I try talking to one or the other of the children, but most conversational attempts are ignored by Tommy, or interrupted with something way more important by Allison. “Want to know what happened today at lunch, though?” or, “Kind of like the really cute guy at . . .” What I have to say simply doesn’t matter because I’m just Mom.

  I am almost constantly in the company of these two teenagers, yet I feel alone.

  One night recently, for some odd reason, Tommy was willing to head downstairs to watch television, rather than sending his sister down (he doesn’t like the solitude of being downstairs). This meant that Allison stayed upstairs with me, wanting to watch music videos on television. “Can we watch something real?” I asked her. She decided on a thirty-minute sit-com re-run. When it was over, I quietly picked up the remote while she was looking through the refrigerator for something to eat, and said, “Oh! [Such-and-such] is on!”

  A very pronounced sigh was heard from the other room.

  “Fine!” I vehemently replied. I pressed the “exit” button on the remote control which returned to the channel of music videos, tossed the remote onto the couch where Allison had flumphed herself in disgust with my interest in a movie, mumbled about going “back to the kitchen, where I apparently belong,” and walked out of the living room.

  * * *

  My house is in a neighborhood, surrounded at a bit of a distance by other houses, yet I am always alone. We live on a corner lot, which means all of the neighbors see us when they turn onto our street to head to their own houses, yet no one ever stops by. None of the neighbors walk up the driveway to talk to me when I am out working in the garden, sitting on the front steps in the sun, or mowing the lawn. Being a shy, introverted adult, it’s difficult for me to make the first gesture. I also feel like an interloper, since we are the newest family to the block.

  We have a bonfire-container in the back yard that I ordered from a catalogue when we lived in Wyoming. During the summer, we have bonfires so I can cook wild rice sausages, drink a wine cooler, and then make s’mores for dessert. But the kids usually only join me for as long as it takes to make a s’more, eat it, and make another to take back to the house.

  The rest of the time I’m sitting out by the bonfire alone.

  * * *

  My son played baseball this summer, as he has done for the past eight summers, but this was the first year no one talked to me more than extending the generic question, “Does anyone know what the score is?”

  I always knew the score because I wasn’t distracted from my appreciation of the game. They all had someone else to talk to, and didn’t seem to notice, or care, that I didn’t.

  * * *

  I have a job teaching writing courses at one of the colleges in town, but because the contract defines me as “temporary,” I have a hard time pursuing relationships with colleagues. As the main focus of my job is to teach the required, general education core writing courses, students might spend a semester with me and never see me again. A colleague once said that, “students need to understand that this is just a revolving door for me. Students come, and students go.” Too bad the same can be said of me. I will be replaced soon enough.

  Although one of the graduate assistants in the department lives on my block, and another G.A. is my age, with children the same ages and genders of mine, they don’t ever include me in their circle of friendship, because my graduate degree separates me from them. I don’t know if they think I am friends with the full professors in the department, or that I have nothing in common with them because I’m not taking courses with them. When I cross paths with one of them in the copy room or in the hallway corridors, the conversational exchange doesn’t get much deeper than, “Did you have a good weekend?” or “Nice jacket!”

  I hear them in the hallway as they walk past my open office door, heading out to lunch together, but they never stop in front of my door to ask if I might care to join them. Instead, I take my can of soup and microwavable container into the faculty lounge long enough to heat up the soup, and then head back to my office to listen to the radio, work on the computer, and eat alone.

  Some days, depending on my schedule and the weather, I will head home for lunch. Watching the television makes me feel like I’m no longer eating alone.

  * * *

  I have a number of friends I’ve collected over the years, but my “temporary” contracts have kept me moving so much that some are geographically left behind. While we manage to keep in touch via email and text messaging for the first month or two, the distance eventually takes its toll. Emails and text messaging cannot replace face-to-face conversation.

  * * *

  My family is geographically close, for the most part, but we aren’t like the families I know who get together weekly or even monthly throughout the year. I see my sister in Chicago about twice a year, and talk to her maybe once or twice on the telephone between visits.

  About five or six years ago, I found out that I have three step-brothers. My mother received a telephone call from a man asking to speak to my father. We didn’t know my father had other children, although my mom didn’t seem too surprised. Ironically, these brothers now seem to have more contact with me than the sister I was raised with, but it’s mostly on their terms. The eldest lives in Florida. I’ve never met him, but exchange birthday and Christmas cards with his family. I have also had a telephone conversation or two with him when I was thinking about trying to visit him. The middle brother lives in upstate New York. He flew out to meet us when we lived in Wyoming, but we haven’t seen him since. He calls regularly, but is always so busy with his own agenda that I don’t often get a word in edgewise. The youngest brother is incarcerated in Oklahoma. We were thinking about visiting him this past summer, when the kids and I went to Texas to meet my ex-husband’s sister and family, but the paperwork didn’t reach me in time. That brother has now started calling me pretty regularly, but again, we tend to only talk about what he wants to talk about. It was important for these men to connect to family. They felt so alone, without the biological connection. Ironically, that is much the same reason I felt it was so important to reconnect the children with their aunt in Texas.

  In spite of having four biological siblings and one sister-in-law, though, I still feel very much alone.

  * * *

  After I got divorced, I returned to college full time to complete my bachelor’s degree. I was a thirty-three-year-old, home-owning, divorced mother of two, sitting in classes with eighteen- to twenty-two-year-old co-eds who spent most of their time talking about parties being held off-campus.

  I got my first cell phone while attending that school. It was an hour’s drive, one way, from my home to that school, and my mother pointed out that I needed to have a way to contact a tow truck if my old car were to break down, “since there’s no one at home to miss you if you were to be late.”

  My first job after college was at a small branch office where everyone was married. I was set up in my own office, was the assistant to the president of the company, and was given a lunch break when my boss left the building for his lunch—typically at a different time from the other six employees in the building.

  After over a year of isolation at that job, I returned to graduate school and accepted a part-time job-share position at my church. While that job was idyllic for my school schedule, it wasn’t a place to meet other singles. I also didn’t have any co-w
orkers to talk with, so I was alone at work as well.

  School became a bit of a haven for me, as I was able to establish some friendships with my classmates, but when they invited me over for weekend get-togethers, I had to decline. My mother wouldn’t watch my children for any occasion that wasn’t directly linked to a school attendance-required event, and I couldn’t afford a babysitter.

  Once I finished that graduate degree, I went back to the job market—and became a teacher. I can’t date students. Other teachers tend to either be married, already in committed relationships, or decades younger. Parents I meet through my children’s school and extra-curricular activities stop talking to me when they discover I’m a college English teacher. I thought I was getting a degree so that I could be a better provider for my children, but it ends up having more social stigma than I need.

  * * *

  I don’t date. Year after year, no man has even inquired. Am I not pretty enough? Do I have to work out in a gym in order to catch his eye? Run up a credit card balance in order to buy sexy clothes? Some days I don’t care, but other days the isolation gets to me. Year after year, alone.

  After about eight years of datelessness, I honestly tried to assess what qualifications a man would need in order for me to date him. I came up with the top four qualities I would want in the “ideal man.” He would be: 1) a non-smoker, 2) drug-free, 3) like to travel, and 4) able to make me laugh. While these didn’t seem like earth-shattering characteristics, I remained alone. Night after night, week after week, year after year . . . alone.

  When I wrote my very first newspaper editorial, about how being single felt like a four-letter word, my friend Sara told me I was single by choice, because “You make a choice every single day to remain single.”

  “No, I don’t!” I replied.

  “C’mon, Jeanette,” she chided. “You know if you really wanted to, you could walk into any bar right now and get a guy.”

  “I don’t want a guy like that! I don’t like drunk guys. Besides, a one-night stand conflicts with my moral code.”

  I don’t want sex, I want love.

  * * *

  I’m scared. Scared, and alone.

  I’m scared of growing old alone. My husband moved out when Tommy was two and Allison was almost four. He said he would go away for six months to a year, which would give me time to “fix everything”: the financial black hole of debt he had created, the children’s behavior, and whatever he deemed was wrong with me at the time. I warned him that my marriage wasn’t going to have the same revolving-door approach that my parents’ marriage had had, but he didn’t believe me. When he got served with the divorce papers three months after he moved out, he came back to the house and tried to scare me enough that I would drop the divorce proceedings. His efforts failed. I was more scared of what would happen to my life if I stayed married. At that moment, I chose to be alone.

  Twelve years after that, though, it has started to feel more like a self-imposed prison sentence. I’ve never been good at making friends. I have a job and go to church regularly, but can’t seem to make friends either place.

  As much as I look forward to my children growing up, moving out, and starting their own lives, I also dread the day they move out. I’m afraid of remaining alone for the rest of my life. I see what my mother’s life is like—she has been living alone since I moved out over twenty years ago. I like the freedoms that come with living alone, but I miss the companionship I thought I had with my husband. I’m tired of being solely responsible for everything from unplugging the bathroom sink to shoveling the driveway of snow every winter. I’m scared when I see a character in a movie eating her dinner over the kitchen sink in a dark and quiet house, because at least when I stand and eat from the plate on the kitchen counter, my house is neither quiet nor dark.

  In the beginning, I think I preferred to be alone, because I saw it as some kind of penance. As a single parent, I always had the built-in excuse that the children needed me more. It was much easier to bury myself under the load I carried raising two toddlers than it was to face the world and admit that no one loved me enough to live with me.

  Then, as the children grew, I convinced myself that no single guy would want to take on the additional responsibility of me and my two children. Even though I have made ends meet, it doesn’t take much to talk myself into believing that a divorced dad, with a few kids of his own, would run for the hills if he saw me coming with my own two children in tow. I even have conversations with Sara, justifying his imagined reaction to my family dynamic: “Let’s see—his kids might come over for a weekend visit, or he might even get them every other weekend. Mine, on the other hand, never go anywhere. Do you think there’s a guy who’s going to want my kids full time, when he only gets his own part time?”

  I am my own worst enemy. My isolation has driven me to be very good at orchestrating every move on my mental chessboard.

  * * *

  When we lived in Wyoming, I had a lot of time for reflection. I analyzed my thoughts about dating, and arrived at the conclusion that I subconsciously sabotage my own efforts at dating. The evidence stemmed from the poor treatment I had received from men since my divorce.

  First was Marvin, a fellow my husband and I knew from town. He called me one day in 1999, at the office where I worked as a realtor. “Wow! I didn’t know you were in real estate. Can I stop by?” he asked excitedly.

  I didn’t realize he was asking if he could stop by the house—at 9:00 p.m. one Friday night, after he had a few drinks. “C’mon, Jeanette, it’s me” he yelled through my closed front door. “Let me in—I just want to talk.”

  Riiiiight. I yelled back that if he didn’t leave, I was going to call the police. As I heard his car driving away from my house, I realized my body was shaking.

  Second was Duane, the boyfriend of someone who lived in the rental apartment of a house five down from mine, who saw me working in the flower garden one day. When he learned that I was an English teacher, he produced a script for a play that he wanted me to correct for him. Another day, he stopped by with candy for the kids, but I wouldn’t let them have any. Fortunately, when my son told Duane that his father wouldn’t let him play football, Duane focused on the word “father” long enough to disengage his interest in me. I wouldn’t let my son finish the sentence that would explain to Duane that his father no longer lived with us.

  The third was Dan, the guy I worked with during my tenure with the Census Bureau in 2000. We worked together in the local census office and went out for lunch together most every day. Everything was fine, until he suggested we see a movie together on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon. “But, you’re married!” I said.

  “It’s okay,” he replied. “My wife works on weekends. We’ll just set the kids up in another movie [his two were about the same age as my two at the time], and go see our own.”

  I declined.

  Fourth was Kurt, another guy from the census job. I met Kurt when I left the office and became a “runner” for the census office. Every day, I would drive out to several of the other counties in our district, exchanging completed forms from the day before for forms that needed to be worked on that day. Kurt was one of my contacts. Everything seemed fine until the night he drove over to my house. We talked for hours on the front porch (I wasn’t comfortable introducing the kids to anyone until I thought he might be a keeper), drank a few cocktails, and he began kissing me. Then his wife called on his cell phone.

  “You have a wife?!” I practically screamed.

  “Well, sort of,” was his lame reply.

  After that, I found a new job.

  The fifth was Alan, a dad on my son’s summer baseball team in 2004. He was fairly good-looking and friendly enough when Claire, one of the moms I would chat with, engaged him in conversation with us. He also had a boy my son’s age and a daughter a year or so younger.r />
  About a month after baseball season ended, Alan and his kids showed up at the end of our pew in church one Sunday. His kids had apparently spotted my kids when they walked into the back of the church, and wanted to sit together. I felt awkward, bookended as we were on either side of the four children.

  The six of us spent quite a bit of time together from August of 2004 through January of 2005, hanging out at each other’s houses, playing games together at the park, and talking for hours and hours as two adults while the kids were doing something else. But all of that changed when I asked him to come to dinner at our house one night in February. When I extended the invitation on Sunday, it was fine. The call to back out didn’t come until an hour before they were due to arrive the following Saturday night. No explanation was offered. Alan just said that they couldn’t make it. That was the first time I cried for a man since my husband walked out.

  The next morning, Alan and the kids were in church. “Sorry about yesterday,” he began. “It’s just—”

  My son interrupted. “My mom was cry—” he managed to get out before my hand clamped over his mouth.

  “No problem,” I said, before excusing us with some made-up reason why we had to leave.

  Six months later, the church secretary asked me if I had heard that Alan had gotten married.

  Finally, there was the sixth, Rich, the guy Allison and I met in an appliance store the third day we lived in Wyoming. Since we had a house but nothing in it (the moving company truck didn’t show up until a month later), Allison and I drove over to a store in town one afternoon to look at new stove/range combinations. The house had a fine electric stove/range in the kitchen, but I preferred to cook with gas.

  While I was looking at the features of the stove/ranges, Allison was playing with a little boy in the store. When it was time to leave the store, Rich invited us to join him and his son for dinner at one of the fast food places in town. Both children turned their smiling faces to me for approval.