Does It Count as Running Away if Your Parents Drove You?

I talk a lot of smack about my dad. Whether it’s over the phone to my brother or while writing about my life and times, it feels like it was my dad who shaped me into the person I am today — not because of any profound parenting skills but instead just the variety of ways he has ignored me over the years.

But there I go again. I’m projecting it all onto this man, who was probably doing his best at the time. Maybe that’s what we all do — we choose a scapegoat, and all of a sudden feel a lot lighter.

The thing is, the guy did a lot of great things for me, too. He taught me how to ride a bike in our townhouse’s back parking lot when I was six. I distinctly remember him with a can of Canadian in one hand while he balanced the back of the bike for me as I peddled like the wind. All the while wondering when he would get the next job call that would take him away for God knew how long.

Dad bailed me out of a bad apartment rental situation when I was 18 years old. He came to the apartment guns blazing (not literally) and screamed at the old hippy dude who was trying to keep my damage deposit. We eventually got the deposit back, which I’m sure wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for ole pops.

And then, Dad drove me to Victoria, BC, when I wanted to run away.

This was right after the bad hippy landlord, and I wanted to escape my tiny corner of the world. Some might call it an adventure, but it was more of a runaway-type situation if I’m truthful.

I was running away from an old boyfriend who I was sure I wouldn’t ever reunite with but still desperately loved. I was running away from my friends — the girls I had grown up with but had somehow drifted apart from, although we still hung out regularly. I was running away from my family, who couldn’t understand me.

After selling most of my possessions and scrounging all of the couch change I could find, I was still vastly short on the funds I needed to skip the province. So I did what any spoiled middle-class girl who thought she was the hardest done person in the world would do: I asked for help from my parents.

They were skeptical. My track record of being a self-sufficient human being was sketchy at best. Despite living on my own since I was 16, this fact only gave them pause. I suppose if I’m putting down the entire story here, I should be more transparent. I actually ran away from home when I was 16. Like leave for school one morning and didn’t come home on the bus type situation. I hid out on acquaintance’s couches, and my parents spent three days with police trying to find me.

As a parent today, I can see how this was a critical turning point in the way my dad felt about me. He was sick over the situation. I’d hear later from my friends that he had been knocking on doors for days on end trying to get any information on where I had gone.

It is so painful to me, now, to think that I put my parents through such heartache and turmoil. No wonder mine and Dad’s relationship never quite recovered after that.

In the three years I had been out of their nest, I had lived in a dungy basement in a house full of renegade teenagers.

We hung sheets for wall dividers and smoked copious amounts of pot for breakfast. I had pandered to midnight moves because I couldn’t pay rent. I couch-surfed when unable to afford a place of my own. A few nights, I slept under the stars on a picnic bench in the least conspicuous parks in town. So, yes, perhaps moving to a province where I knew no one aside from an estranged 86-year-old great-grandmother was a bit of a far-reaching prospect.

However, for some reason, Dad was the first to relent. He thought it might be good for me to get out of the small hometown I had grown up in and see someplace new. So he called his grandmother, my great grandmother, and asked if she’d like a roommate.

Surprisingly enough, she agreed to house me for a while, and a week later, I hopped into Dad’s Dodge extended cab, and we set out for Victoria, BC.

I stayed in Victoria for nearly a year before deciding that the hippy-lifestyle wasn’t exactly for me. My deep-seated country roots kept calling me back home to Alberta. However, the experience was priceless. I lived on and off with my great-grandma Jean, whose antics are another story altogether. I made friends and learned how to live truly independently, without my parents having to constantly bail me out of the precarious situations I was always finding myself in.

The most important lesson I learned, however, was that running away is okay sometimes. The issues I face with the way my father chose to be in my life when I was young might not be the stuff of after-school specials. He rarely participated in parental duties like parent-teacher interviews or bringing me to the doctors and was constantly working abroad for much of my young life.

There’s always been this divide that has kept the two of us at arm’s length. We’re vastly different people personality-wise. The only time I felt comfortable talking with him was after he had a few beers, but before he tucked into the hard stuff. That was the sweet spot, and I have many fond memories with Dad during those moments in childhood.

For a long time, I resented him for not being more active in my life. I’d sit there and wish that he hadn’t called me a little bitch that time I back talked him in the car driving home from school. Or yell at me when I failed my driver’s test, “If you think I’m going to pay $13 for you to fail this thing every time you’ve got another thing coming!”

I held onto these memories with a fierceness that borders on obsessive behaviour. And it made our relationship going forward nearly impossible.

By leaving, giving myself space and just running away for a little while, I was able to see my dad for what he truly is — only human. He made mistakes with his children, just as I have now with my own kids. He learned how to raise children from a generation that didn’t hold the warm and fuzzy parenting style modern-day moms and dads pander to. His goal was to make money for his family, but vices and repressed mental health issues got in the way somewhere along the line.

Last month I turned 35 years old, and the first person to text me, bright and early at 6 AM, was my dad.

“Hey, Linds, just wanted to say Happy Birthday! Hope you have a great day.”

Even now, at 35, my heart still flutters when he reaches out to me. We don’t often talk but do stay in touch through email and text messages. Our father-daughter relationship doesn’t look like the picture of perfection, but it seems to work for us right now.

I used to compare my and Dad’s relationship with those of my friends and their fathers and wonder, what’s wrong with us? We don’t hug or cry together. I certainly don’t go to Dad when I have a deep emotional issue I need to get off my chest. Is our relationship wrong, somehow?

After all these years, what I’ve learned most is that our relationships don’t have to live inside a cookie-cutter box. Each bond and memory we have with our loved-ones will craft a different connective story— something created solely for the two of you.

We can shape these relationships into what works for our family, our lives.

Maybe Dad and I don’t have the kind of relationship that warrants a father of the year award. Or a daughter of the year award, for that matter. But I’ve come to realize that that’s okay. We are working it out our own way and doing our best to stay in one another’s lives.

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Previously Published on medium.com

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Photo credit: by Limor Zellermayer on Unsplash