You can always come home

The five words that gave me the courage to make a change.

A True Life Built is a living photo essay on starting over and building a truer life. It’s for anyone, at any age, who is finding the courage to begin again. Subscribe for free weekly posts.

Sunrise somewhere over the Atlantic. March 22, 2020.

Three years ago this week, I called my father for his birthday. Normally, we’d chat about work and the weather on opposite sides of the world. I was curled up on my back patio in Nairobi, drinking red wine. I could picture my parents in North Carolina, drinking coffee from matching mugs. They’d be sitting side-by-side in their leather recliners, with my mom listening on speaker phone. My calls with my parents were rare, and brief. We are a family of few words.

But in March of 2020, my father was turning 73 and the pandemic was newly born. Normal had ended five days before with the first case in Kenya. This year we discussed the rate of spread, the availability of ICU beds, the borders swinging shut. He asked: If you got sick, could you get care? If you needed to leave, could you get out? Problem-solving is my family’s language of love.

There’s no need to worry, I told him. My husband and I lived in a posh Nairobi neighborhood. We had generators and cash and supplies. I’d be fine. Maybe my father could hear the stress in my voice, or maybe he felt an older instinct to gather his little girl in his arms. He paused, then said five words I never expected to hear: “You could always come home.”

“Home?” I said, stunned. “To New Bern?”
“If you want,” he said. “Just for a few weeks, until this thing blows over.”

I said I’d think about it, wished him happy birthday, and hung up. Then I sat frozen on the patio, phone in hand, with my father’s offer echoing in the thick evening air: You could always come home.

Come home? I could? Where was home anyway?

I certainly didn’t feel at home in Nairobi. My husband and I had just built our dream house in an attempt to save our struggling marriage. It was supposed to be our “forever” home, the place we would finally feel settled. Instead, it seethed with bitter silence. The paint was barely dry and we had already retreated into separate bedrooms.

Home was not my childhood house in San Diego, sold long ago. In that bougainvillea-covered bungalow, my parents and I had been a tight-knit unit of three, the kind of family that eats dinner at seven and sits together by the fire. My dad worked and my mom cooked and I got straight As. I remembered my first home fondly, but there was no returning. It had been decades since I was daddy’s little girl.

But surely home wasn’t the brick house on a golf course where my parents retired. Somehow, in the past decade, I’d only been there once. It felt foreign to me, with little trace of our childhood closeness. It was hard to pinpoint when the distance with my parents had crept in. There was no falling out, no friction, just a gradual accumulation of things left unsaid.

I marveled as my parents, once Berkeley hippies, moved to the small-town South and bought guns and trucks. They wondered how they’d raised a kid who loved big city Brooklyn, did hot yoga and ate avocado toast. They worried, I’m sure, as I followed my husband to East Africa, a final Hail Mary in my long and troubled marriage.

But we never mentioned it. Over the years, my visits home and phone calls slowly dwindled as an invisible gulf widened between us. Then one day, on our brief birthday call, my father threw a lifeline across.

I barely breathed as I turned my father’s offer over in my head. There were plenty of cons: Did I want to live with my parents again at 38, in a town where I knew no one? Could I work remotely? Would it be risky to fly? Would I be judged if I left?

But the pros were profound. Given the fragile state of our marriage, the thought of quarantining with my husband was exhausting. If my parents got sick, I might not be able to get back. I would feel that our relationship ended unfinished, like a half-sung song. Staying meant choosing the path of least resistance. Leaving felt like leaping into the abyss.

I sat motionless as the light slipped away and tropical darkness pooled on the lawn. I sensed an earthquake gathering, one that would send my current life crashing down. In the quiet place deep inside that I worked so hard to ignore, a small voice whispered: “You will not survive the coming darkness in this house. You can no longer hold a broken marriage together.”

As every child of California knows, the safest place in an earthquake is in a doorway. Survival instinct took over. Forty-eight hours later, I left.

JFK, March 22, 2020.

I packed a carry-on, seventeen long years reduced to a single suitcase, and boarded one of the last flights out before the Kenyan borders closed. It felt like a fever dream, the long dash through deserted airports, wiping down everything, touching nothing. I photographed the blinking boards of canceled flights and the eerie emptiness of shuttered shops. I showed up dazed at my parents’ house, their beloved only child and a stranger at their front door.

I didn’t know yet that the call with my father would divide my life into before-and-after, but I think about it all the time now. I think about the weeks that turned to months in my parents’ home as Covid swept the world and the borders stayed shut. Once again, we ate dinner at seven and sat by the fire, my parents in their chairs and me flopped at their feet. I remember the shock of recognition in these moments: yes, I remember this, I still belong here.

Maybe my place by the fire was always open to me, no matter how far I roamed. Without the crisis of Covid and my father’s impulsive offer, I might never have known. I might not have returned until someone was sick and it was too late. The thought breaks my heart. 2020 leveled my marriage but it gave me back my family.

Maybe we spend the first half of our lives leaving our families and the second half finding our way home. I think now of that call as the seam between two chapters of my life. Yes, I had to wade through the wilderness of deep grief after the quake, but I marvel everything that has grown from the rubble. Stone by stone, I am building a truer life with new work and new art and new friends and new love.

It’s all because I listened to my father—because I came home.

Sunrise in New Bern, March 28, 2020.

One of the unexpected joys of starting over has been hearing from others on similar journeys. If something resonates with you, I’d love for you to leave a comment, drop me an email or share a post with a friend!

Liz is a writer and photographer based in Brooklyn.