Harley and Me (6 page)

I try to put her words into perspective, but I know that when I've driven across town to pick up kids from school, I've done so out of necessity. There is no necessity to put my life on the line on a motorcycle. There is no reason I need to replace Izzy.

Except that I do.

I walk into the shop for the first time since the accident and Quentin enfolds me in a hug. The guys there, they get it. I mourn Izzy beyond reason and explanation. This is the grief that tips the balance. I have lost my father and am not done lamenting his passing. I have just begun to see the depths of unhappiness I have sunk to in my increasingly desolate marriage. Grief accretes. With the demise of Izzy, I feel the preciousness of all that I have lost, a sharp thrust of absence and sorrow.

I gather myself up and return home in my car, reduced to four-wheel status for the foreseeable future. Izzy, with her solo seat, with her badass matte-black self, had given me something I desperately needed: myself. But now she is gone.

•
    
CHAPTER FOUR
    
•

THE BITCH IS BACK

To love someone fiercely, to believe in something with your whole heart, to celebrate a fleeting moment in time, to fully engage in a life that doesn't come with guarantees—these are risks that involve vulnerability and often pain.

—BRENÉ BROWN

I sit naked in the bathtub sniffling, makeup smudged around my eyes, when J opens the door. He looks at me quizzically. “What's up?”

“I need you to sign us up for couple's counseling,” I rasp out, reaching for a soggy tissue to blow my nose. “I can't do this any more.”

“Things aren't so bad,” he says. “We'll get through this.”

“I'm not so sure.”

He thinks that whatever is wrong will pass, that this is a phase I'm going through. And clearly, I'm the only one going through it. But night after night, I wake up and stare at the ceiling, feeling alone and alienated and unsure of how to proceed. I feel so distanced from him it hurts. I sleep on the couch most every night. Sharing a bed with someone who feels so far away creates a deep, abiding ache. It's one thing to be alone. It's another to be coupled and awash in loneliness.

It's not the first time we've sought counseling. I signed us up a few years ago when our middle son was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and needed psychiatric care. The counseling helped a bit with
my feelings of abandonment in dealing with our son's illness, but I had not then felt as desperate as I do now. Throughout the marriage I've been the motor behind things: deciding where the kids will go to school, what dentist we'll use, where we'll live, how we'll spend our summers, what we'll eat, how we'll pay for college, when counseling is needed. This time, I need to not be alone making the decision. I ask him to make us an appointment, hoping he'll recognize he's got skin in this game.

Weeks pass after the bathtub conversation. A month, maybe two. I bring up my request again. Eventually, he makes the appointment.

My unhappiness in our marriage first came up more than a decade ago, but after discussing it with J a number of times, nothing changed. I wanted him to acknowledge that our marriage wasn't ideal, that he held as high a standard as I did when it came to our couplehood. Once we were together on that same page, I thought, we'd come up with a plan to improve things. But my concerns were met with blankness, as though my unhappiness did not pertain to him. Sure, our relationship was not great, but whose was?

So I simply stopped mentioning my despair. What's the point in harping if a solution is not to be found? Besides, we were busy raising three children and keeping a roof over our heads.

But this time feels different. I am coming to the end of my rope. I may already be there.

• • •

We talk about the things you talk about in couple's counseling: the need to make time for each other, to go on dates, to partake in activities the other likes. We have both grown so used to doing what we want to do individually, this is a radical shift. He arranges an outing into the city to see a play, and I take his arm as we stroll to the theater. We play Frisbee at the park. I set up a beach day and we pack a picnic for two and bring the dog. I can't see that he's enjoying himself any more than I am.

I feel dead inside. I suspect he does as well.

I believe he views me as a wife and mother, not the interesting, creative person I know myself to be. He acknowledges me for the domestic tasks I accomplish, not for the human being I am. Likewise, I believe J has kept himself locked away in a shell of his own making, that he either doesn't know himself well enough to share that authentic self with me, or he doesn't care to. It's hard to love someone who won't show you himself, and it's harder still to feel another's love when you do not believe you're visible.

We try, but we fail.

Long ago I stopped hoping that the obstacles we faced as a couple might pave a path to greater connection. Though marriage handbooks speak lyrically about how every challenge can be a door to deeper understanding, my experience has been the opposite.

Instead of drawing us closer, moments of deep, frank discussion only push us apart, like the repelling ends of a pair of magnets. We keep digging ourselves in deeper.

The truth is, we're basically mismatched. I'm a writer who cares beyond reason about the written word. J doesn't read—not the literature I'm dying to discuss with someone, nor even my own books and essays that are like children to me. I plan ahead and dream big. He prefers to let things unfold and settles for what life provides. I appreciate quiet and a house that's ordered and simple. He keeps the TV on and favors piles as an organizational strategy. I strive to live within my means. He spends freely with credit cards. All these things might be surmounted, if abiding concern and kindness for the other are at the heart. But kindness and concern seem to have trickled away in recent years.

Still, I try what I've been taught in therapy: using “I” statements, recognizing I'm responsible for my own happiness, trying to be the person I'd like to be paired with. The result is an ever-deepening sense of aloneness.

By the time we make it to counseling, I am unable to picture a different outcome. We remain cordial with each other—to a fault. We're
like roommates careful to not piss the other one off. This timbre is in biting contrast to the rest of my life that, in recent years, has become increasingly rich and comfortable and nourishing. I am enjoying the first full-time job I've had in decades, teaching at a university, working with creative writing students. I love spending time with our teenage children and the activities we pursue together: backpacking, hiking, music, discussing books and philosophy, running. I savor the group of friends who surround me, people alert to and interested in the larger world, and who are interesting to me. I feel amazingly blessed to be accepted and loved by so many.

But when I come home and chat with J, I feel empty. We talk about the house, or the dog, or the kids. If there is no domestic issue to discuss, we tell each other about the little stories we read online that day. Our crayon box of conversation topics holds only a few basic colors. The rest of my life is kaleidoscopic.

And while I realize this is truly a “first-world problem,” I'm not alone with it. Turns out, this experience of dissatisfaction at midlife has a long history for men and women alike and often shows up in marital discord. In some ways, I'm right on schedule. How many movies have we seen in which a balding middle-aged man suddenly buys a sports car or begins an affair with his younger, blonde secretary? I'm not sure what the tropes are for women: Either we become the nagging housewife or the power-driven corporate woman. Or maybe we have a torrid affair.

What does a real women struggling with these issues in midlife look like?

“Women tend to use their associations and relationships with others to gain identity and self-esteem,” I learn from Christiane Northrup, MD, author of
The Wisdom of Menopause
. Home and hearth often matter the most to us, even those among us with high-powered jobs or who have chosen not to marry. Men, on the other hand, derive their identity and self-esteem from the outside world during their prime years: from their job, their income, their accomplishments and accolades. But nothing stays stagnant.

“For both genders, this pattern often changes at midlife,” Northrup writes.

In an ironic role reversal, women at midlife begin to direct their energies toward the world outside the home and family, perhaps for the first time. Men, meanwhile, are often tired of fighting the daily grind and want to draw their energies in, looking forward to retiring, caving up, staying home. Men begin to look for more satisfaction from their domestic relationships at the very moment women are biologically primed to start exploring the larger world. When the relationship is healthy and flexible, this shifting pattern can be easily absorbed. The man may cut back on working hours or retire and take up cooking and other domestic chores while supporting his partner's new outside interests, like starting a business or returning to school.

“Some [couples] are so energized by their newfound freedom and passion that they fall in love all over again,” Northrup writes.

Some, however, do not.

• • •

Waiting to see our counselor the next week, a copy of
The Wall Street Journal
in the waiting room catches my eye. “The Gray Divorcés,” the headline reads. I try to show scant interest, but I'm dying to read it.
Divorce
is not a word J and I have ever used, not a possibility I've allowed in my thinking. I can't even say the word aloud. Marriage is for life. That's what those vows meant. But now the word is hovering in my consciousness in a disturbingly frequent way.

I Google the article when I get home and learn that mine is the first generation more interested in finding personal happiness than in fulfilling marital roles, according to sociologist Susan Brown of Bowling Green State University, the lead author on a study about divorce among middle-aged and older adults. Among people fifty and older, the divorce rate has doubled over the past two decades, her study found. In 1990, only one in ten people who got divorced were aged fifty or older; by 2009 the number was roughly one in four.
And get this: “cheating doesn't appear to be the driving force in gray divorce.” Infidelity was cited among the top three reasons only 27 percent of the time in Brown's study of older divorcés. So much for any ideas of a bodice-ripper affair.

“Marriages that in previous generations would have ended in death now end in divorce,” the article quotes Betsey Stevenson, assistant professor of business and public policy at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, who studies marriage and divorce.

“In the past, people didn't live long enough to reach the forty-year itch. ‘You can't divorce if you're dead,'” says Ms. Stevenson. The fact that many more women work outside the home and might be able to support themselves financially is also part of the equation, giving women options that previous generations might not have had.

The drive to find happiness before it's too late, though, seems to be a primary reason. Many of these divorcés may have twenty-five to thirty-five years of productive life ahead of them when they begin questioning if they want to spend that time with their current mate. And it is women, interestingly, who are the ones mostly initiating these breakups. Among divorces by people ages forty to sixty-nine, women reported seeking the split 66 percent of the time, according to an AARP study.

I am shocked to read there are so many women like me going through upheavals like this. I live in a bedroom community where most of the couples are intact, where my friends and I volunteer on the school council, run book fairs, oversee Halloween carnivals. The few divorces I'm aware of happened long ago and most of the partners have since remarried and now show up, four parents to a child, for school functions.

Do I even want to consider divorce?

An unprecedented 48.5 million women are now in midlife in the United States, reports Northrup. “This group is no longer invisible and silent, but a force to be reckoned with—educated, vocal, sophisticated in our knowledge of medical science, and determined to take control of our own health.” The doctor/author herself went through a divorce at midlife after a twenty-four-year marriage. Her sentiments
echo those from
The Wall Street Journal
article. “With most couples for most of human history, ‘till death do us part' was twenty-five years,” she says. But life expectancy in 1900 was forty-seven. “You saw your first grandchild being born and then you died. So we have really created this whole other stage [in life]. And quite frankly, if we do not step out of our comfort zone now,” then when will we?

I ponder these things. I am forty-nine, married nearly twenty-five years. How many years do I have left? How do I wish to spend them?

Some of this dissatisfaction women experience at midlife has to do with biology. It's no secret that relationship crises are usually attributed to the crazy-making effect of hormonal shifts that occur at this time in life. These hormone-driven changes affect the brain, giving women sharper eyes for inequity and injustice, and voices that insist on speaking up about what they see.

“As the vision-obscuring veil created by the hormones of reproduction begins to lift, a woman's youthful fire and spirit are often rekindled, together with long-sublimated desires and creative drives. Midlife fuels those drives with a volcanic energy that demands an outlet,” writes Northrup.

The brain chemicals that turned women into wonderful nurturers and doting caregivers during the childbearing years drop off in midlife, leaving us with the same basic hormonal makeup we had at about age eleven.

In other words, when those hormones start to wane, watch out, because “the bitch is back.” That's according to writer and humorist Sandra Tsing Loh, who tells of her own struggle with hormonal changes in
The Atlantic
. “If, in an eighty-year life span, a female is fertile for about twenty-five years (let's call it ages fifteen to forty), it is not menopause that triggers the mind-altering and hormone-altering variation; the hormonal ‘disturbance' is actually
fertility
. Fertility is The Change,” she writes.