Running away was always a romantic prospect when I was nine.
There my mom would be, chasing me around the house to make sure I'd brushed my teeth and washed my face at bedtime. At nine-years-old, this is torture akin to waterboarding at Abu Ghraib, only with a tube of Crest toothpaste and an Oral-B brush snagged at Dr. Golub's office.
To use one of my mother's favorite words, that woman was relentless.
And somewhere between the bristles and my bicuspids, I'd hackney a starry-eyed plan to escape. Somewhere. Anywhere. I just needed to get away from the woman who was obsessed with my dental care.
My little girl self lingered on thoughts of hitching rides with drivers headed toward my grandparents' house, Disney World, and a slew of other sparkling havens that welcome children with open arms.
The act of running away would draw me closer to the surreal, take me farther away from my tortured reality, and allow me to escape something I loathed doing.
But the thing is, I never did it.
Because running away from life isn't a panacea, it's a pretty band-aid that allows us to temporarily avoid something.
25 years later, I'm aware of how easy it is to run away from reality as an adult.
We can avoid phone calls, disengage, build up walls, and even physically remove ourselves from scenarios and environments that force us to confront the big, white elephant in our emotional and psychological space.
We can put our head in the sands (or mountains, or cities, or surf, for that matter) and ignore the crises of our lives, and pretend that everything's just wonderful.
Or, we can confront our challenges head on, work through them, and cross them off the list of conquered issues.
I suppose that's the benchmark of being an adult - knowing we can run away, but choosing to stay in the thick of it to fight it out.
How very Invictus. I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.
Kate's Random Musings by Kate the Great is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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