What We Imagine When Women Run Away

As a young girl, running away is considered a flight of fancy. As a grown woman, people think it’s just flight.

When boys run away, they have adventures. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn try to free Jim from slavery; John and Michael Darling joust merrily with the Lost Boys. Even little girls run for adventure. Lucy Pevensie ventures into Professor Kirke’s wardrobe towards Narnia. Claudia Kincaid flees her suburban home to take refuge within the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But when girls become women, they no longer run for revelry like Tom and Huck, like Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty driving a Cadillac into disarray through the American Midwest.

And yet, these were the boys and men I read about as I became a young woman of gumption, thrilled by the prospect of a high-speed chase or even, as I got older, a Krakauerian voyage to the Alaskan wild. Unlike Krakauer’s Supertramp, I wouldn’t die by my escapes.

The first time I ran away, I was six. I tied a big shirt to a long stick, packing it with the essentials: my giga pet, my favorite Beanie Baby (Prance), a toothbrush, and a disposable camera.

“I’m running away!” I told my mom, the stick slung over my drooping shoulder.

She stooped down so her brow line met the top of my head as she brushed my baby curls away. “Oh, are you?”

“Yes, and I’m not coming back.”

“OK, well, I’ll miss you.”

And with that, I began my journey to the least traversed corner of our little backyard, where I stood fraternizing with the birds and the squirrels for a total of ten minutes before returning home, considering myself a real Marco Polo.

In school, running away became a regular hobby of mine. I ran from gym class, from kissy tag at recess. I ran from my friends and my intimidators. In the game of fight or flight, I only knew one solution. In the second grade, I ran embarrassed from the auditorium after peeing my pants during the second act of an upper school production of Bye Bye, Birdie. I knew I was far too old to pee my pants, especially in school. But I had absolutely soaked myself straight down to the knees.

I asked to be excused, a request which made my teacher sneer. Excused? In the middle of “One Boy?” And before I knew it I was squirming in my seat, languishing in my own piss, buckling my belly to stave off the few ounces that weren’t already soaking my pants. I ran before she could say yes and stayed in the bathroom till my bottom half grew somewhat less drippy, stuffing my underwear with Scott one-ply.

Home, as I’d been taught, was also a place from which you could flee. When my mom told me I’d be attending a new school for sixth grade, we fought brutally, slamming doors and shrieking “I HATE you!” In the moment, I was convinced I did hate her. I should hate her. Running was different this time. My mother did not escape to her room and I did not journey to the recesses of the backyard. Rather, we went after each other, both of us racing like mad across our suburban living room.

I barreled up the stairs and into my bedroom closet. I felt my surroundings to make sure I still existed, touching my hands against the walls, listening as the hall bathroom toilet hummed beside me. I closed my eyes tight, imagining I’d be transported, but I never was. I was getting too old for Narnia. Escapes and hideouts were no longer fun and free, but dark and indicative of some major character flaws.

The prospects of living the runaway adventures of Tom Sawyer were beginning to look grim as I grew older. I no longer ran for kicks, but for survival. I ran from friends, from fights with boyfriends, from bad bosses, and uncomfortable social functions. I never ran quite like my mom, though. I never acquired her quick stride, her confident vigor and purpose. Maybe running like her made me too scared of becoming too much like my mother—or maybe I just never had as much reason.

I don’t remember the first time my mom ran away, but I assume it was around when I was ten or eleven. These were the years I started to brim with an unseemly cocktail of angst and energy. School, friends, and the play could never quite do it for me. Television only kept me up—plus, we were only allowed to watch one hour of TV each night. Reading books set me off on my own ideas and adventures. I didn’t simply want to observe the behaviors of Junie B. Jones. I wanted to be Junie B. Jones.

I copied stunts I saw on America’s Funniest Home Videos, doing my best to transform my Alfalfa-adorable face into something earnestly mysterious, pretending to play the bongos and wax poetic like Judy Funny. I had energy that sent me straight to the principal’s office and energy that landed my poems a spot on the teacher’s wall. I was relentless—terribly and proactively relentless. I simply didn’t know when, or how, to quit.

My mom, however, was beginning to turn from a single parent of two adorable kiddos to a hard-nosed guardian of seething pre-teens. She worked double-time while assuming double the blows and outbursts. She wasn’t always perfect, but she had cobbled together a life for us that looked pretty good to any outsider, all the while in recovery from another life she was trying to leave behind.

Escapes and hideouts were no longer fun and free, but dark and indicative of some major character flaws.

She was her own hero, and she was mine too. Even when she was angry, she was beautiful, with her “Rachel” haircut, chunky highlights, pinstripe pantsuits and frosty lips lined in shimmering chestnut. She taught me how to swing dance, how to catch a cheese ball in my mouth, and how to fight back. But often, even amid the dancing and Monopoly-playing, there would be fights and she would run.

Her escapes started small when I was younger—usually taking the form of a breathy jaunt to her bedroom, fleeing a fight without warning or pretense. But we got older and her flights got more memorable. I found myself dealing with a mom who really wanted to run away and stay away: on a family trip to Boston, at the mall or the movies.

Teaching me how to drive involved repeated runaways. I’d pull out of our driveway, cruise just a couple of blocks from the house, slowly speeding up to thirty miles in a twenty-five mile per hour zone, and the arguing would ensue. Even now, I can see my mom clasping the handle atop the passenger side window.

“Pull over,” she’d say through gritted teeth.

And just like that, she’d take off for the house alone, while I, an illegal driver, pulled gently around the block, following her, watching as her pace quickened. Somehow, she beat me home every time.

I’m still not sure that my mom wanted to be chased. Regardless, I always did it. As my sister recently recalled, I used to stand outside her bedroom door knocking and calling her to come back downstairs and finish dinner with us, but it never worked. I remember begging, my unsubtle attempts to beat down the door.

Mom! Please!

I’d turn the door handle until my wrist seized up. But I just wanted her to come downstairs to dinner. I just wanted her to stay, to stop running.

As a low-grade escape artist, my mom joins a camp of reclusive, often hyper-scrutinized women, all coping with their positions on earth in unusual and unpopular ways. In literature, the top stereotypical runaway, next to enchantingly devious children and Hare Krishna-card carrying hippies, is the runaway mother. Books like Where’d You Go Bernadette? and the Neapolitan novels describe women central to the story through their absence, with absence often defining who they are, making them ‘crazier,’ more evasive, and sometimes even less motherly.

In Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s novel Fleishman is in Trouble, Rachel Fleishman, the wife at the center of the divorce around which the book unfolds, disappears suddenly when she neglects to pick up her kids for summer vacation. While Toby Fleishman moves about his new life cursing his wife’s very existence, and recent non-existence, I almost believed Rachel a careless, poor excuse for a mother.

Toby, though a despicable, horn ball anti-hero, somehow feels less despicable as he discredits his ex-wife. “It felt good to finally tell people what a fucking monster he’d been married to,” writes Brodesser-Akner. “He no longer had to worry about her reputation, about whether he was conveying her side of the story accurately . . . Just the facts: She hasn’t contacted her children in almost three weeks. She’s a fucking maniac. No embellishments needed.” His rebuke is so convincingly warranted, I began to shed whatever semblance of feminism I’d applied to my previous readings of Rachel.

But in the book’s final section, Brodesser-Akner renders Fleishman a deeply feminist project. No longer restricted to a Madame Bovary-in-yoga-pants narrative, Rachel comes to life as a human being, a woman with reason to run. “And yes, if you believe his version, she was a vile kind of ex-wife. All ex-wives are vile to hear it,” writes Brodesser-Akner’s narrator—a writer and mother, who occasionally laments the loss of her career in journalism (A sharp contrast to Brodesser-Akner, whose own career, ever on the up and up, is far from lost). “But [Rachel] was also someone who had been driven crazy. Maybe it was the insult of childbirth. Maybe it was the overwhelming unfairness of what happens to a woman’s status and body and position in the culture once she’s a mother. All those things can drive you crazy if you’re a smart person.”

I just wanted her to come downstairs to dinner. I just wanted her to stay, to stop running.

Like Elena Ferrante’s Lila and Maria Semple’s Bernadette, Rachel Fleishman is a smart person. Joanna Kramer, portrayed unfortunately as a spiteful wife and mother, meandering through her pregnancy with an aggression born of reasonable fear, is a smart person. In Avery Corman’s 1977 novel Kramer vs. Kramer, Joanna yells and swears at her husband Ted from the delivery table. By the time she leaves Ted and their young son, disappearing into the dangerously feminine ether of self-improvement, we likely already believe her to be a poisonous cocktail of neglectful mother and shrewish wife. As Brodesser-Akner proves with Rachel, the runaway woman has no recourse unless we give her the chance to explain herself.

Despite our tendency to cast runaway women as mentally disturbed, very few breaking points are indicative of madness. This is what stories like The Neapolitan Quartet and Fleishman is in Trouble get so right—that the truth behind the Madame Bovary effect is not female psychological unsteadiness, but the universal inability to be “content with a country house and a career in motherhood,” as Taylor Noles put it her roundup of “‘Crazy’ Women in Literature Who Were Actually Being Totally Reasonable.”

In a moment of reckoning with Rachel Fleishman’s humanity, Brodesser-Akner writes, “[Rachel] never once thought she deserved happiness. She never once wondered if there was something better out there.” Rachel’s flight comes from an overwhelming sense of unhappiness born of exhaustion, confusion, and trauma she’s never had the chance to fully process.

It would take me years to realize that my own mother was coping with the quiet malaise of single-motherhood—working full-time twice over, signing off on field trips, trying to date in a town filled with either boring or bad men, and going to sleep. Though she could not escape for prolonged periods of time like Rachel Fleishman, she took whatever opportunity she could to flee, albeit temporarily.

Tales of runaways like my mom have given us some of the most complicated women in literature, but they’ve also given us plenty of stories about complicated men, men like Christopher McCandless, who abandoned the ugly glamour of a silver-spoon childhood in favor of a life among the pines. Krakauer’s rough-and-tumble golden boy is a special kind of runaway, with a journey of personal betterment. It’s a story with an end, even if it isn’t a pretty one. The men who run away are privileged enough to have a means and an end. Women are lucky if they get one or the other.

In my family of women, we don’t run for glory. We run because, like Rachel, we’re not ready to go back to our lives, to the burdens and obligations. As women living with trauma, we aren’t always ready to move, able to bury our fears. Running away exists for me daily, in bursts both loud and quiet. I don’t like to feel like I’m escaping, but I am often unsure of what else to do. There is rarely any adventure to be had in running away as an adult woman—only fear of regret and embarrassment.

No longer a girl on the run for thrills, I am a woman running from life. I will be scrutinized as a wild woman, not a wild child. I will be made crazy, a maniac in the eyes of onlookers. Still, I like to imagine I can run without stigma of madness—like Lucy and Claudia, toward a fantasy world, sweeping silently beside a gallery wall clad with Cassatt’s “Lilacs in a Window.”

I like to imagine that this is how my mother runs too, and that we can both forgive ourselves; I hope we can realize that our lives exist in cycles of action and inaction, of showing up and hiding, of running and staying. And sometimes, we just can’t stay.