Odyssey To My Daughter

Odyssey To My Daughter: Discovering motherhood in an ancient culture.

A girl, who dreams of being an ancient warrior, finds it difficult to meet cultural expectations in California. Lacking her mother's understanding and affection, she finds no model for womanhood and mothering that she can relate to. Her attempt at marriage fails and, in her confusion, she manages to lose custody of her daughter.

Thus begins an odyssey away from the modern world and into an ancient way of life where the author slowly learns to embrace and understand the woman and mother within her. On her odyssey she encounters women who treat her as a daughter and she enters into a world of archaic beliefs and social mores. She works in the fields, participates in the cycles of living and dying, and develops a deep love for the people in the village where she lives, and the wild and rocky splendor of Inner Mani surrounding it.. The myths and stories she has absorbed since childhood come alive there, people named after mythical heroines, and the poetry of lamentations that hark back to the fall of Troy. Not far from where she harvests olives in the groves lies the entrance to the Underworld described by Homer in the Odyssey. It is a world that merges the echoes of her youth with a new confidence in her womanhood. When news comes of her father's immanent death, she is torn between wanting to stay where she is and returning to California to see her daughter and her dying father.