Turning Within and Without

by Beth Shervey

I am a runaway--a phobic, hyperlexic runaway who has found herself in a situation where running would be the easiest, most professional and wanderlust-fulfilling option. But I can’t run--at least not physically. The challenge is to stop running internally.

For most of my life, I have taken the nearest exit, real or imagined, whenever life got _____. The usual fill-in-the-blank adjective is boring, but muddled also fits. Beyond a certain age, my escape mimicked the clichéd image of a disgruntled young adult with backpack and passport. At other times, my flight was much more exalted: I ran to graduate school--twice. More often, my flight was packaged, especially to parents, as "professional advancement." I would de-accession my motley possessions and start a new job in some new part of the country--all without a car, too.

My attempts at joining the Peace Corps and teaching English in Japan and China never materialized, but not for lack of trying. I even sought therapy to deal with my recurring ichthyphobia when all compass needles pointed to Asia. However, such opportunities seemed to surface at the same time as a new man. I didn’t leave for fear that the new guy would turn out to be the one. Invariably, he--any he--wasn’t. By then, the Peace Corps door of opportunity had shut, but I still wanted a quick way out. Thus, the process (and I) would start again, if only with less fear of fish.

Fast-forward a few years. I find myself--in no discernible order--on the dark side of 40 with four-year-old and almost-six-year-old sons. I have student debt equal to twice what my parents paid for their first house. I hold a Ph.D. in one branch of the humanities, and am stuck teaching as an adjunct professor in another, with little hope of a full-time gig in either area.

All of this is capped off by a husband who is divorcing me, ostensibly, because I am willfully underemployed and refuse to be browbeaten into stay-at-home-motherhood or worse, yummy-mummydom. The latter is one of two models that he seems to find socially acceptable for the wife of a corporate attorney. The first option is to have a profession that is as easily definable and preferably as profitable as his. I am often caught between the absurdity of the supposed grounds for the disintegration of the marriage and the fear that the given reasons go much deeper, from a more pathological source. Regardless, it all makes me no less want to flee.

My backpack, acquired during my first foray into graduate school, is breathing heavily beneath my bed saying, "Let’s go! Let’s go!" I have no possessions per se. I was still in my doctoral program when I moved in with him, so practically everything in the house is his. The only thing I own of any personal significance is books. Professionally, my chances of being placed by an organization such as the Peace Corps are markedly better than at any other time because I now have what they consider to be desirable skills: I have been teaching college-level English for a decade.

All of this leaves me staring at a house full of superhero detritus and the source of reasons why I haven’t run away this time: my sons. Part of me does want to escape--with them. I love stories of mothers who inflict adventures on their children in which the kids initially resent being uprooted, but later become thankful that they escaped boring, middle-class middle America. This is the world that produced me--the middle of the middle and the boring of the boring. As a child, I was just aching for someone to rescue me. No one did, of course, other than the likes of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Frederick Forsythe, or any of a zillion other escapist authors. The reasons I am still staring at Batman staring at Superman are much less idealistic. Children do not travel lightly, even after they are potty-trained. This summer’s road trip to grandmother’s house—barely 1,500 miles round trip—took four days in a station wagon full of little-boy stuff.

The economics of an incomplete divorce have also left me in desperate financial flux with no promise of any payoff. On top of it all, the Peace Corps won’t place volunteers with dependent children. I am also tired. I am achingly exhausted, physically and emotionally, and not taking evasive action, for once, seems to require the least energy. The problem is that I have been traveling, internally, at such a velocity that I don’t know if I can stop, or even slow down, without getting squashed in an emotional pileup.

Movement, especially intellectual, creates an illusion that feeds upon itself. This gets exaggerated by the culture of academia, which rewards mental self-absorption. For a professional, hyperlexic runaway, this is an ideal situation. My dilemma, my angst, is that it is really a mirage. As an adjunct faculty member, I zip along the access road that parallels the main, academic thoroughfare. Occasionally I give the impression of traveling in the same direction at the same speed, but I am not. Now, when I need to make real that which I have been playing for years, I am lost. It is as if I am stuck in the middle of a traffic flow with no way to stop or turn. At any given moment, I feel I have a grip, no matter how tenuous, on something familiar—my boys, my teaching, and my writing—with the hope and faith that I can control my direction. More often, however, I am adrift with no tangible connection to my world and my self, afraid that I will go unnoticed, and simply implode.

Beth Shervey teaches writing and American Studies, and edits at the University of Dayton in Ohio. Her only major work is the Little Theatre on the Square: Four Decades of a Small-town Equity Theatre, SIU Press, 2000. She can be reached at beth.shervey@notes.udayton.edu