I Forgot to Run Away
Mothers, wild ones, and listening to your internal Josh Duhamel
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In my late twenties, I had a recurring dream featuring the B-list actor Josh Duhamel. I had not, at the time, seen Josh Duhamel in a single film. I was only aware of his existence because of a fear of flying that was soothed by reading US Weeklys, and by his association with Fergie, that bright shining star of the aughts who had once peed herself on stage (that was my Halloween costume one year, pee and all).
In some dream-like backstory, Josh Duhamel (in the dream, I always called him by his full name) and I had had an affair. I never got to see the actual romance, but I got the feeling it was something that only happened once or twice. When I tried to break it off with Josh Duhamel, to explain to him that I loved my partner and couldn’t carry on like this, he wouldn't let me go. In the dream, I would be eating dinner in my apartment with my boyfriend, and glance out the bay windows to see Josh Duhamel standing in the rain under a street light mouthing the words “I love you.” He followed me everywhere, relentless, and, I felt, overly emotional, wanting way more than I had ever implied I would give him. He came to my workplace with flowers, waited at the bottom of my hiking trail, screaming my name. The dream never resolved itself. I would always wake up still knowing, as sure as I knew anything, that Josh Duhamel was out there somewhere, with his conventionally attractive face pressed against the edge of ruining everything I had worked for. It would have been funny if it wasn’t so menacing, so real.
My little brother was living at Esalen at the time, and as people who live at Esalen do, he had a roommate who could interpret dreams. I told her the details of my Josh Duhamel dream, in the living room of their house by the sea, which had a jade tree growing in the rafters. “I’m not even attracted to Josh Duhamel,” I added. “He’s like, not even on my radar!”
“Exactly,” she said, “he’s a nobody from nowhere.”
“I think it's about infidelity,” I told her. “I've been with the same man for almost a decade, we're getting married soon, and I think some part of me is afraid.”
“No,” she replied, with the calm of someone who lives under a jade tree, “that's not it.”
She thought for a minute and then asked, “is there some creative or artistic pursuit that used to be important to you but no longer has a place in your life? That's what Josh Duhamel is. He’s not the part of you that wants to sow your wild oats before marriage. He’s the part of you that makes you feel alive, which you no longer listen to.”
As a college student, I had spent all of my time and energy doing comedy. As a teenager I was the quirky friend in every high-school theater production. As a little girl I performed bits into a tape recorder, and everyone I knew told me that when I grew up I would be on Saturday Night Live. This is not, it turns out, how you get on Saturday Night Live. I moved to Los Angeles after college and gave a career in performance the smallest of shots, and then found myself a special education teacher. It turned out that putting yourself out there as an actress was incredibly vulnerable and thankless, and standing in front of a classroom of children who everyone else had given up on was just as exhilarating as being on stage. Learning how to not be depressed and anxious all of the time, the primary work of my 20s, was also quite consuming. There was no time for auditions. I thought about this and gave the dream-interpeter a slow, “you got me” nod.
There is a dream I have now, that I have had for the past year or so, that takes place in an unnamed beachside town in Mexico. In the dream I have driven there, seemingly in one long haul until I knew it felt right to stop. I have a small apartment overlooking the ocean where I eat a leisurely breakfast and drink sweet coffee every morning. By day I write and walk and slowly and thoughtfully pick out my food at the market. Every night I go to the same beachside restaurant to eat, drink, and eventually dance until the place clears out. The restaurant owner, an older man whose quiet seriousness belies his joie d’vivre, lets me stay after closing and then walks me home down the beach. Sometimes he spends the night. I fall asleep listening to the waves. It’s not just that my husband and children are not with me, but that I am no longer related to them, somehow. They are living a good life without me, with no memory of my significance to them.
If I learned anything in the jade house those years ago, it's that this dream is about escape, yes, but it is also about having abandoned my own internal Mexican beachtown. The restaurant owner, like Josh Duhamel before him, looks like a love affair but is really a lover’s quarrel between two sides of my own self; the one who wants to live boldly, and the one who feels she needs to make herself as small as possible to be a wife and a mother. When I told my therapist about the Mexico dream, she suggested I enjoy it, soak up all the little details. We call the part of me that wants to run away “The Wild One,” and she felt I should take this opportunity to speak to her, to find out what she wanted.
Before I had children, though I felt myself to be very empathetic, I could not for the life of me understand how a mother could leave her family. Almost immediately after giving birth to my first child, it all of a sudden made perfect sense. It is crushing, this feeling of codependency. Most parents I believe, love their children, but it is primarily mothers who are tied so tightly to their children's sense of being in the world. I remember imagining, as a new mother, running off to the other side of the world and living in a nunnery. But I knew, no matter where or who I was, that the cord connecting me to my child would tug and ache, and a happy life would be impossible, not just for my kid, but for me. As a lifelong devotee of doing anything people tell me not to do, I wanted to rip that cord out with all my might. No one, I felt, had prepared me for this.
I have a friend, a man, who found out years after the fact that he was the father of a young child. He very much wanted to have a relationship with this child, and began to visit him, more and more over the years, eventually taking on much of the parenting responsibilities. This friend is a very devoted dad, a wonderful dad, and I believe he suffered greatly from being treated as an afterthought in his own child’s raising.. I imagine that this man has wished, as I have wished, that no baby could be born without their father’s knowing. And yet I think of him, often, with envy, wondering what it would be like to have so few expectations of you, for so long. When given the choice, this man did the opposite of run away. But there’s the thing of it; it was a choice.
If there were ever a time when mothers shared a collective desire to run away from it all, it was this past year. Sometimes the needs of my family felt so burdensome I wanted to claw them off of me. I lost myself completely, in some ways, but in other ways I felt more myself than I had in a long, long time. The Wild One had a lean year, but she also got more creative.
One day I did run away, with permission, which ruins some of the excitement, but beggars can’t be gone-wthout-a-note-ers. I asked for the day off and refused to tell anyone where I was going. I drove along the coast for hours, listening to Lana del Rey turned all the way up and feeling very purposeful. I ordered an affogato, of all things, and ate it with a long plastic spoon in the front seat of my car while I read a book I can’t remember. It was not Mexico, or an illicit hotel-room meet-up with Josh Duhamel, but it was something.
I learned how to sing this year. That was a little wild. I’d been singing all my life but I never knew I could learn to be better. I forgot how good it felt, how much I used to get from it, that for much of my life, many people would have considered me a singer. On a road trip with my family this Spring, I practiced letting the wild one shine. Stupid little things like making everyone pull over when something looked cool or buying my husband the weirdest greeting card I could find in a gas station, filling it out with a pen attached to the cash register, and leaving it for him in the glove compartment. This is not becoming a cast member on SNL, but it made the cord feel loose enough that I could breathe.
And then there’s you. I decided last February, perhaps with some prescience, that I would write regularly, for the first time in many, many years. Often I feel a kind of wildness take over me, as I think about these pieces on walks and in the middle of the night or while watching my children fight over the last banana-strawberry applesauce packet. You have been a container for my need to feel more alive, to take risks, to give my urges their due.
I also did not run away because I did not mother alone. I had neighbors, who became friends, and then “sister wives” who did it with me, who made endless, aimless days with children feel just a little bit like a foreign town. We had a saying, when things got really bad, that we were going to walk into the ocean and see if, and when, our instincts to carry on kicked in. As in, “I cried in my bed while the kids watched Octonauts all morning, now I think I’ll walk into the ocean.” This always made me think of The Awakening, that devastating feminist or anti-feminist tale, which I read for a high school class where I did the bare minimum so I could use as much of my time as possible being wild. All I remember is the final scene where she walks into the ocean and we are made to believe she has drowned herself because she cannot be true self if she stays with her children, and she cannot live with herself if she runs away. I remember thinking that it was all very sad but had little to do with me, as I was a woman in the 21st Century. It didn't occur to me that advances in social norms had still not allowed for women to opt out of their families as men so often did, that there was something absolutely timeless about her oppression.
This week, my daughter has been running away. She packs her backpack with the cat ears on it and places a dazzling array of detritus into a few recycled Target bags, grabs her blue water bottle, and informs us of her intentions. One time she put out her hand and asked, “Mama, do you want to come with me to run away?” I think she mostly asked this because she would always rather have a friend to play with, she is just like that, but I was struck by how that thought mirrored my own experience of being a mother. The Runaway Bunny’s mother seems determined to chase after her son, and I can relate to that in a way, but I also feel the other way around. Even if my children never speak to me again, they will drag me to that place alongside them. Even if they run away, in all of the ways children can, part of me will go with them, whether I like it or not.
One Saturday my daughter spent all morning preparing to run away. There were many, many, bags and much discussion about where the best place in the house to run away would be. (There was some consensus that under a table was ideal, but the question of coziness came up and was never sorted out.) Then it was nap time, so I put her down, and when I heard her cry and went in to get her a few hours later, she looked at me with flushed cheeks and that matted post-nap mane and said “Mama! I forgot to run away!”
The optical illusion of this year, not for all but perhaps for a handful of us, is that, once having no distance from our families become completely literal, and not just a feeling or cultural responsibility, a space had to be carved out of nothing. A wildness had to be rooted out and regenerated. The only other option was a walk into the ocean, which was helpful to imagine but never really an option.
I still see Josh Duhamel, running through the airport after me as I hurriedly corral my family onto a boarding plane. I still dream of Mexico, but I’ve lost the clarity of the images. The dream is more about colors, now, about sounds, and when I wake up I can see those colors, just a little bit, in the shadows of my own bedroom.
I don't think the wild one is completely satisfied, and I don't know if she will be until I get in the car and just keep driving, in some way, literally or figuratively. I don't know what is worse; forgetting to run away, actually running away, or making a conscious decision not to. But even if I don't run away, I don't want to forget to be wild. Maybe there's a way to do it all without drowning.
-Not sick of me yet? Check out my guest post on moms with ADHD on the fantabulous Claire Zulky’s Evil Witches Newsletter today!
I stumbled onto your post this morning from Evil Witches, and am so thankful for this post and your writing. The Wild One in me has had to get creative this last year, too, so I can satisfy an urge to be spontaneous and free without leaving my family or bringing COVID home. It’s mostly been driving to get clandestine desserts, secret only because I don’t want to tell anyone where I’m going or negotiate what to bring home. It wasn’t enough, but it was something.
Such a deeply moving, wildly courageous post Sarah... made me cry and laugh and cry again. I've come to appreciate that the continuing 'not quite satisfied' wild woman is deep and vital resource... she calls to me too and reminds me not to forget to come looking for her even if running away is not really an option.