Just lucky

Are motorcycles an escape?

Only four of us showed up at the Guzzi club meeting. We talked about Roger’s trip to the recent New Mexico rally at tiny, rustic Datil, and we talked about the upcoming Missouri-Kansas club rally.

We’d ordered, been served, and were eating when Bill, across the table from me, and I can’t recall what prompted him to mention this, said that he’d never got along with his dad.

Never, I asked, and he nodded: never. Me either, I said. Neither of us was smiling.

I looked at Roger next to me. He shook his head. I glanced over at Mike, across from Roger. Mike said he’d left home at 13 and hadn’t gone back. Hadn’t had a chance to see if he and his father could be friends.

That made three out of the four of us who’d come from unhappy homes... and one uncommitted. Unusual? I don’t know.

Bill, I said, have you forgiven your father for his toughness with you?

I have, he said, but I haven’t gotten over it. It still affects me in ways I don’t always understand.

I feel the same, I said. I suspect I’m still reacting somehow to things that happened when I was a kid. My parents have been gone for decades, and I’m still hearing their disappointed voices.

Bill said his father was career military. Roger said his dad was, too. Both fathers were hardline disciplinarians, guys with no give in ’em.

My father, I said, never served. But he never knew me or cared to. He knew what he wanted me to be, and that’s all he gave a damn about. He watched me fall short in every aspect. As he watched, he grew more and more disgusted with me. He never liked me, let alone loved me.

Bill said that he’d thought about this a lot. His lifelong friend Jim, as a graduate student, had made a study of 4,000 men who’d come from homes where their fathers had been unloving and even hostile. Jim’s own father had beaten him and abused his sister.

Jim interviewed those 4,000 men at length and wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on them, on their childhoods and their adulthoods.

According to Jim, the memories of those childhood experiences linger. They can manipulate us adults in ways that we do not understand. Certain events can act as ‘triggers’, causing us to react inappropriately – in ways we aren’t aware of and struggle to control.

Jim’s feeling is that the triggered emotion is fear, but we experience it as anger. We hear someone say something or we watch someone do something, and we get angry – even if we could not explain why we’re angry. We take offense – but we’re not sure against what.

Jim is quick to remind us that no one tried to trigger anything. If it’s something someone says, they did not say the offensive thing on purpose. The trigger is within us.

In my case, the trigger is a very slight, very fleeting unmeant show of disrespect on the part of my wife. I imagine she’s acting as if she doesn’t care about me or she’s saying something about me that seems belittling. If she ‘snaps’ at me, say, I will become upset.

In the past, I would react and fight back verbally, always surprising my wife, who’d of course had no intention of upsetting me. A week or 10-day cold war in our house would ensue.

A lot of work and thought about this awful cycle has helped me defuse this thing. Now I stop and remind myself that (1) she does love me, and (2) the trigger is within me. Didn’t have anything to do with her.

My wife and I don’t have many of the problems couples have that try to break them up. We’ve never had a lot of money but we don’t worry much about money. We don’t seem to need more or better things or a bigger house... and no one’s having affairs. These mysterious voices from the past, whatever they’re saying to me, have been the biggest destructive forces in our life together.

Is riding for many of us a way to act out our independence from those homes where we feel we were treated so harshly? Were motorcycles our way out? Especially if our parents strongly disapproved of motorcycles, were we asserting our right to choose our own path in life?

If we were, and if we’re still riding and enjoying it long after there’s no one left to prove anything to…

Are those voices from childhood still whispering inside our helmets?

As we left the restaurant and gathered around the bikes outside, I thanked Bill for starting that conversation, not what one would expect at the Guzzi club meeting. It rang true for me immediately, Bill, I said. It’s like you’d been reading my mail…

When you talk to Jim, I said, tell him that you talked about this here, and three of the four of us riders could have been subjects in his study. See if he thinks it could have been something about our childhoods... or if we were just lucky.