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The Long Way Home

On Fathers, Daughters, Winter, and the Promises We Keep

By Wendy Nunn Odum

I am nearly sixty years old, and my daddy can still touch the very quick of my emotions.

There is something almost astonishing about that. I have lived a great deal of life. I have married, raised children, traveled, suffered, loved, lost, and found my way through experiences that the little girl I once was could never have imagined. I have developed beliefs and convictions that are sometimes very different from my father’s. I have become a woman in my own right.

And yet, when I look at him, now a man in his eighties, there is a part of me for whom no time has passed at all.

I am still his little girl.

Not in the sense that I haven’t grown up. I have. Perhaps more than I ever wanted to.

But love does not always observe the passage of time. Some attachments exist in a place that seems untouched by chronology. They remain as immediate as the moment they were first formed.

I have spent much of my life trying to understand my relationship with my father. I have also spent a considerable portion of it avoiding that very task.

It is an odd thing to realize that the person who made you feel safest in the world could also become the person with whom you found it most difficult to be emotionally honest.

But that is part of my story.

And perhaps, at this stage of my life, I am finally old enough to tell it without needing either of us to be innocent.

— -

One of my earliest memories is of watching Daddy shave.

I was perhaps five or six years old. I remember standing near him in the bathroom, looking up at this man who seemed to me the very center of the universe.

I asked him whether he loved me more than anybody else in the world.

He told me he did.

I accepted this as an established fact of enormous importance and immediately went to inform my mother.

She was lying outside in the sunshine with my baby sister, Kim.

“Daddy said he loves me more than he loves you and Kim!”

Mama looked at me.

“Oh, really?”

I can still feel the triumph of that announcement.

I was Daddy’s girl.

I don’t remember worrying about the diplomatic consequences of declaring myself the favorite. Children have a wonderful capacity for accepting love as an absolute, particularly when it comes from the person they most adore.

I loved my mother, too. But my relationship with Daddy occupied a different place in my emotional world.

He was my certainty.

My parents’ marriage was troubled, and eventually they separated. There were difficult circumstances surrounding that separation, circumstances I understood only in fragments. Children rarely know the whole story of the adults around them, although they often feel its consequences more acutely than anyone realizes.

When I had to choose where I wanted to live, I chose Daddy.

For a time, it was just the two of us.

I remember his steadiness. He was organized, capable, dependable. He was not a man given to emotional chaos. He took care of things. He knew what needed to be done and generally did it.

He was affectionate with me. He hugged me, kissed me, held me close. I remember the comfort of sleeping beside him sometimes when I was little.

There was a feeling of absolute security in his presence.

I sometimes wonder whether a child’s earliest understanding of God is shaped by the person who first makes the world feel safe.

For me, Daddy was the person who seemed to know how to keep the world from falling apart.

And because I loved him so completely, his opinion of me mattered more than I can adequately describe.

He didn’t have to raise his voice.

A lifted eyebrow could undo me.

A particular look of disappointment could make me feel that something essential had gone wrong between us.

I don’t remember being afraid that he would stop loving me. It was subtler than that.

I was afraid of becoming someone he couldn’t admire.

Perhaps that distinction is difficult to understand unless you’ve loved someone that way.

— -

There was a mountain visible from the house where Daddy and I lived. Sauratown Mountain, so beautiful and blue.

I remember looking at it and being moved to write a poem.

I was a child who loved words. I loved books, imagination, the private worlds that could be entered through language. I had a rich interior life, although I didn’t yet know to call it that.

I wrote my poem about the mountain and took it to Daddy.

I was proud of it.

I wanted him to see what I had made.

He read it, and instead of expressing the admiration I had hoped for, he questioned whether I had actually written it.

He began explaining plagiarism.

I can still remember how that felt.

I don’t know whether he thought the poem was too sophisticated for a child my age or whether he was simply being careful to teach me about honesty. I don’t know whether he realized that his response would stay with me for the rest of my life.

But I remember the hurt.

It wasn’t simply that he failed to praise me.

It was that the person whose belief in me mattered most seemed unable to believe that those words had come from me.

I had offered him something that felt like a piece of my soul, and he had questioned its ownership.

I never told him how deeply that wounded me.

Even now, writing about it, I find myself wanting to explain his side.

That instinct is familiar. I have spent much of my life protecting my father’s intentions from the consequences of my feelings.

I don’t say that with bitterness.

I say it because I am finally beginning to recognize it.

— -

When Daddy remarried, I was about twelve.

My stepmother was a wonderful woman. She was responsible, organized, and dependable, much like my father.

But I did not welcome her.

I had already experienced the rupture of my parents’ marriage. My mother had her own struggles, and the emotional world of my childhood had often been difficult to navigate.

Daddy was the stable ground beneath my feet.

His remarriage changed the shape of that ground.

I resented the new arrangement, and I resented responsibilities that seemed to fall upon me.

I remember mornings when Daddy would wake me before he left for work so I could make sure the younger children got up.

My stepmother could sleep, but I had to get up.

I felt like Cinderella. It seem so silly looking back.

That was how I understood it then.

Now I sometimes wonder whether Daddy enjoyed those few quiet minutes with me before he left for the day. Whether he saw our morning routine as something entirely different from the burden I experienced.

I don’t know.

There is a particular sadness in realizing that two people can occupy the same moment and carry away completely different memories of it.

The house was orderly. Things were taken care of.

But emotional life could be more difficult.

Daddy was not a man who welcomed every expression of feeling.

Once, when I told him I was nervous about something, he told me I was too young to have nerves.

I have thought about that remark many times.

I don’t believe he intended to dismiss my inner life. He may have been trying to encourage strength, to tell me that I needn’t worry.

But I was a child who worried, who felt deeply, who noticed things that weren’t said.

And I learned that some feelings were better kept to myself.

As I grew older, I also became increasingly aware of the painful history between my parents.

There were aspects of my personality that reminded Daddy of Mama. I could sense his discomfort with those similarities.

Sometimes even mentioning her seemed to change the atmosphere.

I loved them both, but I felt that certain parts of myself belonged to a world he didn’t want to revisit.

So I began to keep those parts hidden.

The irony is that I had been drawn to my father precisely because he made me feel safe.

Yet I became less and less comfortable bringing him my unguarded emotional truth.

— -

There are other memories, though, that have no such complication.

Baseball, for instance.

Baseball was practically an inheritance in my family.

Two of my uncles played professionally. Joe Bailey Nunn went out toward Los Angeles with the possibility of playing for the Dodgers, although marriage and family life ultimately brought him home. My great-uncle Howard Nunn also played professional baseball.

Daddy was a wonderful athlete.

I grew up with baseball as part of the family language. I played on a boys’ team when I was little. Daddy and I would go outside and hit balls. We played a game called roly bats.

I remember the feel of those days more than any particular score.

And I remember one period when our television wasn’t working.

Daddy and I listened to baseball games on the radio.

There was nothing elaborate about it.

Just the two of us, the announcer’s voice, the pauses between pitches, the small sounds of an ordinary evening.

I was happy.

Completely happy.

I didn’t care that we didn’t have a television.

I didn’t need anything else.

When I think about that little girl now, I am struck by how little she required.

She didn’t need to impress him. She didn’t need to prove her intelligence or explain her feelings.

She only needed to be near him.

I wish I could step back into that room for an hour.

Not to change anything.

Just to sit there again.

— -

There is a poem by David Bottoms called Sign for My Father, Who Stressed the Bunt.

I have always associated it with Daddy.

The connection is partly baseball, of course, but it goes much deeper.

Daddy taught me that success was not measured by extravagance or spectacle.

There was nothing particularly admirable about being flashy.

You learned the fundamentals.

You practiced.

You became competent.

You did the ordinary things correctly, because if you couldn’t master the basics, the rest didn’t matter very much.

The bunt is such a fitting image.

It is not the heroic swing that sends a ball sailing over the fence.

It is a small, deliberate act requiring discipline and precision. Sometimes it means sacrificing the opportunity for personal glory because the game requires something else.

There is something profoundly characteristic of my father in that idea.

And I recognize how deeply I absorbed it.

I have never been particularly impressed by grand displays of importance. I am more interested in what people actually do, whether they keep their word, whether they show up, whether they can be depended upon when something needs doing.

I learned that from Daddy.

Some lessons are taught in conversation.

Others are taught by the way a person gets out of bed every morning.

— -

Daddy loved Robert Frost.

Of all Frost’s poems, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening has always made me think of him.

I imagine the traveler pausing in the snow, drawn toward the stillness and beauty of the woods.

For a moment, there is no work, no household, no obligation.

Only the invitation to remain.

But the traveler remembers his promises.

He has somewhere to be.

There are things that must be done.

I see Daddy in that poem because I think responsibility was one of the organizing principles of his life.

He could appreciate beauty. He loved poetry. He had an appreciation for the natural world.

But pleasure was not allowed to become an excuse for neglecting duty.

I wonder sometimes how much he denied himself.

How many things he might have enjoyed if he hadn’t felt compelled to be the person who kept everything functioning.

And I wonder whether the discipline I admired in him sometimes cost him more than I understood.

Robert Hayden’s Those Winter Sundays reaches into another part of my heart.

The poem describes a father rising early in the cold, building fires to warm the house and performing small acts of care that the child barely notices.

Only with maturity does the child begin to comprehend the sacrifices involved.

Hayden’s phrase, “love’s austere and lonely offices,” has stayed with me.

It reminds me that love is not always expressed in the language we most want to hear.

Sometimes love is a fire built before dawn.

Sometimes it is a pair of shoes polished for a child.

Sometimes it is a man leaving for work while the rest of the household sleeps.

I can see my father in those gestures.

And I can see myself in the child who didn’t always understand them.

There is gratitude in that recognition.

But there is also grief.

Not the grief of having been unloved.

The grief of realizing how much love may have passed between us without either of us fully knowing how to receive it.

— -

Then there is Winter, by Tori Amos.

That song reaches me in a way that is difficult to explain without becoming emotional.

It carries something of the father-daughter relationship that the poems about duty cannot quite contain.

The tenderness.

The passage of time.

The strange ache of growing away from the person whose hand once seemed large enough to hold the whole world steady.

I hear in it the little girl I was and the woman I was becoming.

And I hear the sorrow of knowing that growing up sometimes requires us to move beyond the emotional world of the people we love most.

I think this was especially difficult for me.

I didn’t want to stop loving Daddy.

I didn’t want to disappoint him.

But I was becoming someone whose emotional nature, curiosity, and developing beliefs did not always fit comfortably within his expectations.

I could not remain his little girl in the way I had once been.

And I didn’t yet know how to become myself while remaining close to him.

So I left.

— -

I was seventeen when I ran from home.

That is the word I use now.

Ran.

I married young. I became a mother. I lived in Texas, in Italy, and in other places far from the small Southern town where I had grown up.

There was an extraordinary world beyond home, and I got to experience parts of it that I might never otherwise have known.

I am grateful for that.

I am grateful for the people I met, the places I saw, the cultures I encountered, and the ways those experiences enlarged my understanding of life.

But I can acknowledge now that some of my movement was flight.

I was running from emotional discomfort that I didn’t know how to resolve.

I could not comfortably tell Daddy how I really felt.

And because he was the most important relationship in my life, that inability was profoundly painful.

There is a moment in Leaving Las Vegas when Nicolas Cage’s character, injured and trying to turn his suffering into a joke, refers to himself as a prickly pear.

That image has stayed with me.

I think Daddy and I were prickly pears with one another.

Not because there was an absence of tenderness.

Quite the opposite.

There was so much tenderness that we sometimes protected it with thorns.

Humor could take the place of confession.

Silence could take the place of disagreement.

Distance could take the place of the difficult conversation.

And so I went out into the world.

I became a wife and a mother. I learned to navigate unfamiliar places. I developed my own understanding of religion, philosophy, politics, human nature, and the complicated business of being alive.

I became different from my father.

In some ways, very different.

But the distance did not diminish my love for him.

I could travel across an ocean and still carry his voice within me.

That was the curious thing.

I had left home, but home had not left me.

— -

I have always been drawn to mythology, symbolism, and the work of Carl Jung.

I think stories endure because they describe patterns of human experience that we recognize long before we can explain them.

One of those stories is the prodigal child.

I have come to recognize something of myself in that figure.

I left.

I wandered.

I experienced the world beyond the boundaries of my father’s household.

But I don’t see my return as an admission that leaving was a mistake.

I needed to leave.

I needed to discover who I was when I was no longer standing beneath the weight of my father’s expectations.

I needed to find out what I believed, what I valued, what I could endure, and what kind of woman I would become.

Jung called the process of becoming one’s own person individuation.

It is not simply rebellion against the people who formed us.

Nor is it a rejection of everything we inherited.

It is the difficult work of separating what genuinely belongs to us from what we have unconsciously accepted as our identity.

I think I spent many years confusing my father’s approval with my own sense of worth.

If he approved, I felt secure.

If I sensed disappointment, something within me seemed to collapse.

And yet, I also inherited from him values that I cherish.

Discipline. Reliability. Integrity. The importance of mastering the fundamentals. The understanding that duty is sometimes more important than recognition.

I do not want to discard those things.

I want to carry them freely.

There is a difference between living according to a value because you believe in it and living according to it because you are afraid of disappointing someone.

It has taken me a long time to understand that difference.

— -

Astrology has offered me another symbolic language for this process.

I was born with Saturn in Aries in the ninth house, nearly stationary before its retrograde motion.

My Mercury, in Cancer in the twelfth house, forms a close square to Saturn.

I find this symbolism deeply interesting.

Saturn has long been associated with authority, structure, responsibility, discipline, and the father archetype.

Mercury is the planet of language, thought, and expression.

Cancer speaks to family, memory, attachment, and emotional belonging.

Aries is concerned with the emergence of the individual self, the courage to say, I am.

The ninth house encompasses travel, philosophy, belief, and the search for meaning. The twelfth speaks to the hidden life of the psyche, the things we carry beneath ordinary awareness.

I don’t regard my birth chart as a verdict handed down by the universe.

I regard it as a symbolic map through which I can contemplate the patterns of my life.

And when I consider that Mercury-Saturn square, I think about the little girl who wrote a poem about a mountain.

Mercury wanted to speak.

Saturn questioned the authority of her words.

I think about the teenager who found it difficult to express her feelings honestly.

Mercury had something to say.

Saturn stood at the door.

And I think about the seventeen-year-old who left home and eventually crossed oceans, seeking a wider world in which to discover her own beliefs.

Saturn in Aries, in the ninth house, becomes an evocative symbol of the struggle to establish an independent philosophy of life.

But I also think about the discipline of writing itself.

About the care with which I choose words.

About the desire to understand rather than merely react.

Perhaps the same Saturn that once seemed to inhibit my voice also helped give it endurance.

Perhaps the task was never to defeat the father within me.

Perhaps it was to stop mistaking his voice for the only voice that mattered.

— -

Now I am approaching my second Saturn return.

In astrology, Saturn returns to its natal position roughly every twenty-nine and a half years.

The second return, near the age of sixty, is traditionally associated with a reassessment of the life one has built and the structures one has inherited.

I find myself contemplating what I have carried.

What I have chosen.

What I have accepted out of love.

What I have accepted out of fear.

And what I might finally be ready to lay down.

I have lived long enough to understand that my father was never simply the powerful figure I imagined him to be as a child.

He was a human being.

A man with his own childhood, his own losses, his own disappointments, his own wounds.

His mother died by suicide.

He knew something about suffering long before I was old enough to understand it.

I wonder what that did to his understanding of emotional life.

I wonder whether his insistence on steadiness and responsibility was, in part, a way of keeping chaos at a distance.

I wonder whether he believed that if he could keep everything functioning, the people he loved would be safe.

I cannot know all of this.

And I don’t want to invent explanations for him simply because they would make the story easier to understand.

But I can allow myself to wonder.

I can recognize that the man who raised me had an interior life every bit as complicated as my own.

And I can love him with a compassion that was not available to the child I once was.

— -

Daddy is in his eighties now.

I am almost sixty.

We disagree about things.

Sometimes important things.

Our politics are different. Our ways of understanding the world are not always the same.

There are aspects of my life and my beliefs that he may never fully understand.

But I am no longer afraid of that.

I am no longer the little girl who could be undone by a raised eyebrow.

Or perhaps I should say that little girl is still within me, but she no longer has to make all my decisions.

I can look at my father and see a man rather than an unquestionable authority.

I can disagree with him and remain his daughter.

I can recognize the ways he hurt me without denying the enormous love he gave me.

And I can recognize the ways I misunderstood him without denying the reality of my own feelings.

I don’t need to settle every old question.

I don’t need to decide whether the morning he woke me was an act of tenderness or simply an expectation that I help with the younger children.

I don’t need to know whether he remembers the poem about the mountain.

I can let those memories remain complicated.

They are part of the truth.

And I have come to believe that love becomes richer when we no longer require it to be uncomplicated.

— -

Sometimes I think about all the versions of myself my father has known.

The little girl who watched him shave.

The child who wanted to be his favorite.

The girl who played baseball with the boys.

The young poet who brought him a mountain written in words.

The resentful adolescent who felt displaced by his remarriage.

The seventeen-year-old who ran.

The young wife and mother living far from home.

The woman who developed beliefs different from his own.

And now this woman, approaching sixty, looking back across the whole long road.

I wonder whether he knows how much I have loved him through every one of those lives.

I wonder whether he knows that even when I was farthest away, some part of me was still sitting beside him, listening to baseball on the radio.

There is something I find almost unbearably tender about that memory.

The two of us, in a quiet house, listening to a game neither of us could see.

Perhaps that is an image of our relationship itself.

So much happening beyond our view.

So much understood without being spoken.

And so much that we would only begin to comprehend years later.

I think of Frost’s traveler and his promises.

I think of Hayden’s father rising in the cold.

I think of the bunt, that humble, disciplined act that asks us to value something beyond applause.

And I think of Winter, with its aching awareness that time carries us forward whether we are ready or not.

I have come to see that these poems and songs are not merely things that remind me of Daddy.

They are part of the language through which I have tried to understand him.

And perhaps through understanding him, I have been trying to understand myself.

I once believed that becoming my own person required distance.

Maybe it did, for a while.

But I have discovered that the deeper journey is not always away from home.

Sometimes it is the journey back, undertaken with enough life behind us to see the people we love more clearly.

I don’t return as the girl who left at seventeen.

I return with a lifetime of experiences, convictions, mistakes, and hard-earned understanding.

I return with my own voice.

And still, when I look at Daddy, I love him with the immediacy of that little girl standing beside the bathroom mirror.

There is no contradiction in that anymore.

I can be his daughter.

I can be myself.

I can carry the best of what he taught me without carrying the fear that I will never be good enough.

And I can finally say what I couldn’t say when I was young:

Daddy, I loved you so much that sometimes I was afraid to let you see who I really was.

I thought that if you saw all of me, you might be disappointed.

So I went out into the world and spent years becoming the person I needed to become.

But I never stopped loving you.

Not for a moment.

And now, after all these years, I think I understand something I couldn’t have understood at seventeen.

I didn’t have to choose between belonging to you and belonging to myself.

I could do both.

I think of that little girl listening to baseball on the radio, content simply to be near her father.

And I think of the woman I am now, who has traveled so far and lived so much.

They are both me.

They have always been me.

And perhaps coming home is nothing more mysterious than allowing them, at last, to sit together in the same room.

The game is on.

Daddy is beside me.

And for a little while, there is nowhere else I need to be.