Harley and Me (8 page)

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.

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.

I lob bread for the young woman I was when I paired up with J at twenty-two, impressionable, looking for security at any cost. I chuck another piece for the older, wiser, and flintier woman I've since become, staring down the barrel of fifty. Bread tossed away, like the hours of my life, the dreams and hopes I must relinquish in order for other, new ones to arrive. I empty my hands of the challah.

• • •

Getting comfortable on the motorcycle is helping me become more at ease in this flow state. So much of my past has been spent striving—for an education, the right career, a good marriage, the best opportunities for my children, material goods, a sense of security. But I now see I placed too heavy a value on achieving those goals. Getting the things I want in life does not always fulfill me. Nor does it always work out.

As a young family, J and I struggled; we saved and sacrificed to buy a modest starter home when Jarrod was just one and we were still in our twenties. Two more children arrived and we lost that house to foreclosure eight years later when the real estate market plummeted. Still, unanticipated blessings followed that difficult experience. But only after I gave into the devastation and finally let go.

On the day I drove away from that home we'd painted and landscaped and built a patio for, we started over with nothing in savings, ruined credit, and three small children to raise. I felt failure, awash in shame.

We were sure we'd been cheated by the system. We'd played by the rules, saved diligently, been frugal, and still lost. However, I found the courage to make a decision I would never have made otherwise. I applied for a graduate program in creative writing, taking out student loans for the whole experience. Assuming debt seemed a risky course. But believing that I had nothing left to lose, a vitally enriching career became mine.

I take solace from one of Csikszentmihalyi's discoveries about flow state. When a person's life makes sense, he explains, the “fact that one is not slim, rich, or powerful no longer matters. The tide of rising expectations is stilled; unfulfilled needs no longer trouble the mind. Even the most humdrum experiences become enjoyable.”

I'm praying that this new perspective will pay off. Because, as Csikszentmihalyi reminds me, flow experiences are not necessarily pleasant at the time they occur. “The swimmer's muscles might have ached during his most memorable race, his lungs might have felt like exploding, and he might have been dizzy with fatigue—yet these could have been the best moments of his life.” Gaining control of one's life is never easy, and many times, quite painful. But in the long run, optimal experiences add up to a sense of determining the content of one's life. And that, he argues, “comes as close to what is usually meant by happiness as anything we can conceivably imagine.”

• • •

Yom Kippur approaches and I decide that since Rosh Hashanah was so helpful, I'll observe the atonement holy day as well. I find it odd that Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, precedes the Day of Atonement, that the sweetness of the New Year comes first, apples dipped in honey, when the fasting had yet to begin. But maybe that's human
nature. We need a taste of the sweetness to lure us into doing the hard work.