Running Away

I want to run away.

I've been thinking a lot about running away lately. In a purely theoretical sense, you understand. Literally running? With my naughty hip? Are you kidding? No, but I've been fantasizing about getting in the car and driving as far as I can on one tank of petrol and staying in a motel and sleeping for a long time. Of course, I'd wake up and have to have a BIG breakfast (the Full English) and then I'd need to find more petrol so I could slink back home and Explain Myself. So, of course, I wouldn't really run away. I just get this impulse occasionally. Am I alone?

My cousin Steve ran away when he was 16. With his 16 year old girlfriend. They got all the way from Toronto to Calgary before their car fell apart. They found somewhere to stay and got jobs and didn't come back for a long time. Months? Years? I was deeply impressed, I remember. He was a legend on our side of the Atlantic. {g}

Running away.
Away from the dishes, the dirty kitchen floor, the strange smell coming from the sink, the book packaging I need to do, the phone calls I need to make, the problems I can't solve, the church I want to be family but isn't, the house I don't know how to repair, the image in the mirror. That old, tired woman. The daughter who isn't exactly what I dreamed of when I was pregnant. The terrible ...self... who could even think such a thing.

I ran away to the circus when I was 17. Did you know that? I have to explain that Billy Smart's Circus' winter quarters were just down the road from my parents and I already worked for the family, who owned Windsor Safari Park (now remodelled as Legoland.) I was offered a caravan to share and I sold ice-creams at their shows in the Big Top. They had trailers with live animals in those days. I went through the tiger trailer once, a narrow corridor between cages of sad, bored creatures who would have run away themselves if they'd had the energy.

It didn't last long. Though I did try the high-wire and trapeze before I slunk home to do my homework. Running away is scary. But coming home is harder. Staying home. Blooming where you're planted. It's hard work. Blooming hard.

Because if I don't love my family, who will? If I don't clean the kitchen bin out, who would? If it's not me tying our household together, keeping them clean and fed and guided and loved then who?

I'd love to be able to tie up this post neatly with scripture and renewed direction, but I'm too exhausted to do that. I cry out, 'Help me Lord'. That's all I can do. Like the psalmists I know that God is big enough to listen to my complaints, to count my tears and yet not have to give an account to me for His actions. That, itself, is strangely reassuring.

Is the fleeing impulse, the fantasy of running away, a pressure-relieving mechanism during times of stress? Maybe I'd explode if I didn't dream about driving, driving, driving up the M1 on one tank of petrol?

How about you?