The Bigger They Get

Nanny Goats in Panties wrote a terrific post about running away from home as a little girl. Her post brought back memories.

I ran away once. I was eight.

I don’t remember what I was pissed about. My kid sister probably touched something on my side of our bedroom and no doubt Mom refused to beat the crap out of her, banish her, or shave her head and lock her in the basement. She always was Mom’s favorite.

Whatever, it was The Final Straw. I huffed and I puffed. I stomped outside and found myself a hobo stick. I stomped back in slamming doors and mumbling all sorts of nastiness. Mom was sewing at the dining room table. Right under her nose, I tied up a bandanna filled with peanut butter crackers, M&M’s, a book, and a deck of Old Maid cards. Mom said nothing. I hung it from my stick. Still she said nothing. I slung it over my shoulder. The bandanna came untied and it all fell out. She smiled.

I tied up my provisions again and stomped to the front door yelling, I’m leaving and I’m never coming back.

I just knew the threat of losing me forever would be more than Mom could bear. She would come running, apologize profusely and, sobbing, she would beg me to stay.

Any second now.

Right………now.

Okay. NOW.

Crap. She couldn’t let me just leave, could she?

Please don’t shout, she said. You’ll wake your baby brother. Oh, and you might want to take a sweater. It’ll get chilly when the sun sets.

If I had known the word, at that point I would have thought Oh, shit, now what? But in 1968 polite little girls didn’t know that word. And prideful little girls followed through on their threats. So I left, slamming the door again on the way out. That, at least, was satisfying.

Our street dead ended at a small ravine with a creek running through the bottom of it. We were forbidden to play there, so naturally that’s where I headed. I sat and ate my crackers, read my book, imagined how worried Mom must be, played with my cards, dropped rocks into the creek, fantasized about the police finding me and then lecturing Mom about how she’d better be nicer to me. I ate the M&M’s, got my feet wet, looked for tadpoles…

All of this took about twenty minutes.

Nobody came looking for me.

I was bored and the shadows were getting kind of creepy. I swallowed my pride and went home.

I never ran away again because my early experience of life on the street taught me an important lesson - a lesson I made excellent use of throughout my teen years. This is what I learned: I could make my mom’s life a lot more unpleasant without missing any meals or risking exposure to the elements by simply staying home and being a miserable bitch.

What about you? Have you ever run away from home? Write a post about it and send me the link. I’ll post all the links next Saturday. Please share this with anyone else you think might want to participate. The more the merrier…

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 23rd, 2008 at 10:44 pm and is filed under Lessons Learned. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.