Oh how I used to wish I could run away from home! I had a miserable childhood, my mother was crazy, my older brothers were allowed to pick on me and bully me and my father sat silently ignoring it all.
I couldn’t run away though, as my mother wouldn’t let me out of her sight and any time I was out of her sight (say at school) there was always someone else who could stop me.
A good few years ago I went on a coach trip and at a rest stop I almost got on the wrong bus on purpose. To this day I don’t know what stopped me.
I spent years thinking about faking my own death and fleeing the country to live under an assumed name (I heard of a man who as thought to have died, but turned out he’d ‘run away’ from his life and was living in another country). Which might have been feasible once upon a time, but can’t see it working nowadays…
Reading this thread, I have “The Kid” running through my head:
I’m the kid who ran away with the circus.
Now I’m watering elephants.
Me? I floated down the Mississippi on a raft for a week or two … (but my parents knew where I was, since they signed my Scout permission slip… I’m so embarrassed…)
I ran away from home when I was about 5 as well. I took our German Shepard dog named Tracy along (apparently I wasn’t stupid). I vaguely remembering walking a few blocks to where there was a convenience store but not much else. Apparently the police located me but were unable to get to me because Tracy would growl if they approached; so they suggested I walk home and drove next me all the way back.
I ran away a couple times as a teenager. I had drug issues then, so it was unsurprising. Now, decades later, I wish I could undo some of the pain and worry I caused my (loving but strict) parents because now I am a divorced parent with two boys that are growing towards their teenaged years with alarming speed and I fear history repeating itself.
I remember telling my mom I was going to run away a couple of times when I was little – nothing as traumatic as those upthread, I probably had been told ‘non’ about something. She just raised one eyebrow and said, “Watch out for the Brahmas in the back pasture.” I never got very far, since we lived on a big farm. I would stomp out to the creek and then get distracted by something and come home for dinner.
I had a friend as a little kid who wanted to run away because his mother didn’t acquiesce to his every demand. He told his mother we were both running away. I didn’t want to go, but she said it was OK and made us some sandwiches. We were gone for about an hour.
As teenager I left for a week twice. I had to make it clear to my parents that they could not control me. It worked to some degree, but they never really got it until years later.
Not me but my dad, when he was a very little boy of three or four or so. He was upset with his mother and told her was going to run away. This was rural England. He got as far as walking up a nearby hill from which he could still see the family home. Then he realised it was getting on for tea time and he was hungry so he went home. On meeting his mother at the door he said “I think I’ll run away tomorrow.”
I never did, but my sister and I helped our little brother run away. He was about 6 or 7 years old, and he got mad at Mom for something or other, and declared he was going to run away. So we jumped in and helped him. I think one of us made a sandwich and smuggled it into the bedroom, and the other got a handkerchief and a yardstick to make a hobo’s bundle for him. Our house sat on about 4 acres, laid out with maybe 150 feet of frontage on the road, and it went way, way back from there. There was a clearing in the woods a few hundred feet from the house, so the 3 of us went back there, and my brother raged about how awful it was living there. At some point, I think he ate his sandwich, and decided he wanted another, so he came back all 300-400 feet back home. I don’t think mom even noticed we were gone.
I thought about running away almost every day of my life as a kid, but I realized that my parents would take a while to start looking for me, and when they found me, they would be more angry than worried and I’d only come home to punishment, not tearful hugs. I was smart enough to know to just skip all the bollocks. It wasn’t worth it.