Harley and Me

by Bernadette Murphy

  Unable to decide on a new bike, I take a loaner so Rebecca and I can continue riding. I’m always on the lookout for my next motorcycle. Whenever I see one that draws my eye, I think, Wow, I like the profile, I like that look. But when we get closer, I see it’s just another version of Izzy. Eventually, I decide that I’ll simply make myself a new Izzy. I buy a brand-new Iron model from Quentin and have the dealership change out the stock pipes like Izzy. They also change the handlebars. Again, to be like the old Izzy.

  Not having her to ride has been painful. Without the passing glances of other motorists, I feel like I’m starting to disappear. Most of my life, I’ve wanted to fade into the background, to be quiet and unobtrusive, to take up as little space as possible. Suddenly I want to be seen and heard.

  The new bike I christen Izzy Bella.

  • • •

  Meanwhile, my crush gains steam. I ask my therapist a few weeks later, “Can I have an affair and live with myself?” I tell her about Quentin, though I’m still determined that the word divorce has no place in my vocabulary. “Maybe a little affair would take away my discomfort with the marriage, might make all of this go away?”

  I tell her about the dreams that have been plaguing my sleep and the sparking desire I feel. I’m not so much convinced it is Quentin I’m running toward as much as the sadness at home I’m trying to escape. Whatever the reason, something has to change.

  Sure, the grass is always greener somewhere else, she tells me, but an affair is not an accurate appraisal of another option. “What about just leaving your marriage?”

  “That seems too harsh, like that would hurt J too much. With an affair, I might be able to get some of what I need without hurting him, too.”

  “But if you’re miserable, don’t you deserve a chance to be happy?”

  “I guess. But not at someone else’s expense.”

  I have worked hard for emotional balance, for a sense of integrity and peace, for a kind of clearheadedness that requires my ability to face myself in the mirror each morning. Could I have an affair without giving that up? My therapist suggests I take the coming week to think about it.

  • • •

  At couple’s counseling that week, I want to scream in frustration when J monopolizes the time, repeating the same stories about what a poor wife I’ve been, how I don’t appreciate him. I’m confused why he wants to stay married when he thinks so poorly of me. Our therapist tries to cut him off to give me a chance to speak.

  “I’m not done talking,” he says.

  • • •

  Thoughts of Quentin keep distracting me when I should be focusing on my marriage. He invites Rebecca and me, along with a bunch of the guys from the shop, to see his band perform one night. He’s on a stage only a few feet away from me, rocking his guitar with his pelvis. This is killing me. He smiles and winks in my direction. Later, without my knowledge, Rebecca tells him I have a crush and reports his response back to me.

  He may be edgy and a bad boy, but when it comes to marital fidelity, he’s a stickler. “She’s cute and interesting and I like her a lot. But I cannot get tangled up in anything like that.”

  And, as it turns out, I discover I’m not the kind of person to start an affair. I don’t have it in me. It’s clear in no time: Nothing’s going to happen.

  • • •

  Nearly a year earlier, J had booked a family cruise. Ten days in Alaska to celebrate our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary and his birthday. In the past twenty-four years, we’ve taken only one family vacation that didn’t involve tents, a Coleman stove, and sleeping bags. The kids are leaving home soon. If we’re ever going to do a proper family vacation, now’s the time.

  But I can’t bear the thought. I ask him to cancel the cruise.

  It’s not that I don’t want to go to Alaska, or that spending time with the kids wouldn’t be ideal. I just feel sick at the idea of publicly celebrating our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. I don’t want to keep going with the terse conversations between us in therapy, straining the frayed threads of affection that are supposed to tie us together as we maintain a facade that everything is fine. The duplicity eats me alive.

  Perhaps we find ourselves stuck in these roles because we don’t know any others. My parents did not have a good marriage. My mother’s severe bipolar disorder made such a thing impossible. Still, they stayed married until my mother’s death, because that’s what Catholic couples are supposed to do. J’s parents had a downright ugly marriage. His mother regularly spoke ill of his father. She’d been railing for a divorce for a decade before I entered the picture. Every year, the date of their anniversary was pointedly ignored. And yet they, too, remained married until his mother passed. Her animosity reached even beyond the grave with a stipulation in her will that excluded her husband entirely from her estate.

  Given our models, how were J and I to know what a good marriage felt like or looked like or how to construct one? We knew only that marriage is supposed to be for life. When I gently introduced the fact that we were both miserable and maybe our marriage had run its course, the ire and rage directed at me was epic.

  J never followed up on canceling the cruise. He was determined we were all going to go. The night he selected for our anniversary celebration was to be the formal night on the cruise. My daughter and I dressed in floor-length gowns. J and our sons wore suits. We looked stunning as a family. But I felt awful. I was supposed to be a woman celebrating twenty-five years of married love and yet I felt so estranged from this man and so hushed about my own unhappiness I was close to violence. The pretend-it’s-all-okay vibe was no longer working. I plastered a smile on my face to make the night unfold as easily as possible, but when I got into an argument with one of the kids after dinner, the feeling of disconnect only grew.

  J and I retreated to our stateroom. Anniversary balloons adorned the door. The room steward had folded bathroom towels into kissing swans and placed them on our bed as a special reminder of our anniversary. The falseness of the entire night cleaved my chest. J went out to get a drink. I stripped off my lovely gown—worn less than two hours—and looked at my naked self in the mirror. I was an attractive, fit woman, but the stress of the last few years had inscribed a deep worry line between my brows.

  I wanted to break the mirror. I wanted to cut the dress I’d just worn to shreds. I wanted to jump overboard.

  And then the scariest thought of all came. I had stopped using alcohol and all mind-altering chemicals when Jarrod was an infant twenty-four years earlier in the hopes of maintaining my sanity. I was determined not to follow my mother down the rabbit hole. Sobriety had been a wonderful gift that allowed me to be the best mother I knew how. But sitting in that stateroom, my gown a puddle on the floor, makeup smeared, every fiber in my body started to scream: I want a drink. I need a drink. I need to not feel this.

  Had there been alcohol or drugs in the stateroom, I would have used them.

  Just wait for it to pass. This will pass.

  Fortunately, it did.

  But I came to a moment of critical self-discovery, seeing clearly for the first time a truth that had nipped at my heels for more than ten years and that I had, until this moment, refused to see. I could not have an affair and stay emotionally balanced and sober.

  I couldn’t stay married, either.

  • • •

  “The Gray Divorcés” article I’d read offered a statistic that stayed with me: The vast majority of divorcés ages forty to seventy-nine (80 percent) consider themselves, on a scale from 1 to 10, to be on the top half of life’s ladder. Furthermore, 56 percent even consider themselves on the uppermost rungs, at levels 8 to 10.

  That’s what I want, to be as close to that top rung in as many parts of my life as possible. Sure, we can’t have joy and good things at every moment of every day. But I was not willing to settle for a life partially lived. I want to be awake and alive and tuned in to every part of my life. I want to be happy. I deserve to be happy.

&n
bsp; So now I just have to find out what it takes to get there.

  •CHAPTER FIVE•

  IF YOU’RE HAPPY AND YOU KNOW IT

  Our risk is our cure.

  —LEE UPTON

  “Female Motorcycle Riders Feel Happier, More Confident and Sexier Than Women Who Don’t Ride,” reads the press release from a motorcycle manufacturer detailing a study said to demonstrate this finding. Though it’s a blatant effort to sell motorcycles to a mostly untapped market, the study nonetheless offers interesting insight.

  Describing the responses of some two thousand women—half motorcycle riders, half not—the 2013 study finds that riding a motorcycle greatly improves a woman’s feelings of overall self-worth. More than twice as many women riders report always feeling happy, nearly four times as many say they always feel sexy, and nearly twice as many always feel confident. Most important to me, more than half of women riders cite their motorcycle as a key source of happiness, and nearly three in four believe their lives have improved since they started riding.

  Obviously, motorcyclists don’t have a monopoly on happiness. Many factors contribute to feelings of wholeness, completeness, and joy—the stuff I’m after. According to psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, one of the most crucial components of happiness is what he calls “flow state.”

  As he describes it, flow is the mental state in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, completely caught up in and enjoying the process of the activity, not thinking about its potential outcome or payoff.

  When in a flow, “nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.” You’re so wholeheartedly immersed in what you’re doing that you cease to be aware of yourself as a separate entity. You lose yourself in the experience.

  And if you’re like me, you might also forget to eat and sleep.

  This is how I feel when riding Izzy Bella. I don’t wish I was somewhere else or doing something else. I’m fully present and focused to a single point of consciousness. I also try to tap into this pointed focus when I run with Rebecca or have deep conversations with close friends. Backpacking and hiking, writing, reading, knitting, and dancing around my kitchen chopping vegetables for soup can bring on the same state.

  But when I go home after a flow-state adventure, I feel the disparity between that engrossed, tuned-in aliveness and the leaden numbness that surrounds me in my marriage.

  Some might argue that since I spend the majority of my time doing things that provide deep and abiding happiness, I shouldn’t complain about the times I don’t. But that’s a sticking point. The more joy I feel, the more capacity for joy I possess, and the more aware I am of the parts of my life that chafe. Looking for joy now that I see the bareness of my marriage feels riskier than ever—and more important.

  Risk taking is one key way to access this flow state, and there are many outlets to attain it. The commonly held idea is that risk takers are motivated by a pathological need to exorcise deep-seated fears or are compensating for underlying flaws. But Csikszentmihalyi sees just the opposite. The risk taker’s enjoyment derives not from the danger itself, he maintains, but from her ability to minimize it. Rather than experiencing a morbid thrill from courting disaster, the risk taker enjoys the perfectly healthy, positive emotion of being able to influence potentially dangerous forces.

  “What people enjoy is not the sense of being in control, but the sense of exercising control in difficult situations,” he writes.

  But here’s the catch: It’s not possible, Csikszentmihalyi says, to experience a feeling of control unless you’re willing to give up the safety of protective routines. Only when a doubtful outcome is at stake, and you’re able to influence that conclusion, can you know whether you’re in control.

  • • •

  I completely understand that my immersion in the motorcycle culture and my father’s death are eternally entwined. A year after buying my first motorcycle, I still grieve my father’s passing even as I discover a new freedom. There is no longer a parent watching over my shoulder to see if I am being the good Catholic girl, fulfilling the saintly aspiration my parents sought for me. I was named for Saint Bernadette, who had visions of the Virgin Mary and dug a spring in Lourdes, France, whose waters are said to have miraculous healing powers. My parents had been told they couldn’t have children. Twelve years after they married, and four years after they adopted my brother Frank, my conception was, for them, a divine act. I was to be their holy child, the one who redeemed others. Though they never said so in as many words, I believed I was the one who was sent to heal my ailing mother—an expectation I repeatedly failed to meet.

  Being the incarnation of all things holy has become a burden. I am ready to give up my saint’s stained halo and the desire to be flawless. To do so, though, requires I also give up just about everything I think I know about myself.

  I have taken the first step. J and I got into an argument recently over Hope’s cell phone bill. Just another of the daily challenges that married people with children face, but for me, it was the breaking point. Our arguments had always gone around in circles, lasting for hours and getting us nowhere. The futility was too much.

  “I’m done,” I told him. “I can’t do this anymore.”

  He sputtered and got angry and didn’t want to believe me. “After all I’ve done for you,” he scolded.

  But I repeated myself a few days later when we met with the couple’s counselor. “I no longer want to be married.”

  “We might as well quit therapy, then,” he said, and turned on the deep freeze.

  It had taken months to summon the words, to rally the courage to spit them out. I didn’t know what would come next and I wasn’t quite ready to move on. Hope was a senior in high school. J and I had decided we’d stay in the same house, living together as a family, until she graduated. But he’d told the kids and both his and my family about the pending separation without discussing it with me. I was furious.

  • • •

  Though I’ve given up my saint’s halo, I still find solace in spiritual practice. I’m leaving this weekend to spend Rosh Hashanah with a group of women in a rented house in Ventura, a beach town midway between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. I need some time to center myself. The plan is to have a simple Rosh Hashanah dinner on Sunday night and then take a high-speed catamaran to Santa Cruz Island—one of the amazing Channel Islands off the coast. We plan a day of hiking and open-water kayaking, a way of communing with God through nature and starting the Jewish New Year.

  I am obviously not Jewish, but I join in the evening’s ritual meal with delight, asking questions about the food, the holiday of the New Year, the coming of Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), and its rituals. Why do Jewish holidays always start at sundown when, as Catholics, we always started our holy days with the new day? When the sundown tradition is explained to me, I welcome the idea of walking through the darkness, waiting for the light of the holiday to bring illumination into my life.

  One of the women explains tashlich, a ritual performed on Rosh Hashanah in which participants gather up leftover challah from the meal and carry it to running water—a stream, a lake, or the ocean. People then cast the bread upon the waters, letting go of sins from the past year. Our group isn’t planning to undertake this ritual tonight. But for me, it strikes a nerve.

  I feel a need for forgiveness and ask the ladies if they’ll join me in the rite of tashlich. We take flashlights to the beach a block from the house, feel the sand that had been hot enough to burn our feet only a few hours earlier now cool and damp between our toes. The moon is almost nonexistent. The ocean’s waves make a lacy scrim barely discernable in the flashlights’ dim glow.

  As a kid, my siblings and I made communion wafers out of Wonder Bread, its texture perfect—soft, white, pliable—to form little discs. This challah, though, feels coarse with sharp crusts like the pieces of
glass that feel lodged in my lungs whenever I think about divorce. I tear the bread into little pieces, lots and lots of pieces for all the things I need to let go.

  First off, being a devoted wife. I toss a piece into the ocean. I spent twenty-five years faithful, giving my heart and soul to my family only to find myself profoundly alone at the end of each day. This is especially true over the past decade when I have been unable to ignore the constant, low-grade ache of loneliness. To stay in the marriage and fake devotion is to do us both a grave disservice. But I mourn the wife I set out to be.

  I heave another piece of bread into the ocean—my ambition to be a perfect mother. J and I raised three wonderful young people. The work we did as parents is a testament to our love of them and our desire to be the best parents we could, an aspiration that trumped our need to be good spouses. I will have to give up the mantle of the virtuous mother. A good mother doesn’t leave her children’s father. She keeps the family together at any cost, is the glue that binds it all together. But I lost my glue long ago.

  I pitch bread for the marriage I thought I was building all those years, for the household we created. Another piece of challah for the many hardships we weathered: J’s almost fatal pulmonary embolism, Neil’s near-drowning at age three and, in high school, his diagnosis with a severe anxiety disorder. Then there was the death of J’s mother and the passing of my father. We’d been able to endure those hardships as a couple, difficulties that might have ended our marriage long before. But rather than strengthening the bond, the troubles piled on top of each other, burdening our relationship with a weight we couldn’t escape. My sin, I suppose, was in letting it happen, not speaking up sooner, not knowing how to redirect the trajectory.