The First Man I Couldn't Reach

My father was the science teacher at my school and the minister of our tiny country church. Which meant I grew up with God in the front row and my father in the back, both watching, both judging, both impossible to please. 

He wasn’t violent, just relentlessly critical in ways that hollow a girl quietly over years. 

I worked impossibly hard to earn his approval, but the tenderness I needed wasn’t something he knew how to give. 

So I learned early to chase love, to work for it, to contort myself for it, and to imagine gentleness in places it didn’t exist. 

In my early teens, on long walks under the gum trees lining our country road, I used to imagine a man with wings walking beside me. Someone gentle, steady, vast enough to wrap me in safety I’d never known. I thought I was dreaming of a future husband, but I see now I was imagining the father-shaped protection I never received.

I didn’t know then that this ache, this hunger for protection and acceptance that I had never been given, would shape every love that came after. 

But it did.