by Ashley Judd
The three of us sat on velvet sofas in my sleeping porch, where I feel held and comforted by the hillside visible through floor-to-ceiling windows. But shortly into our appointment—I don’t even recall exactly what had been said, but obviously we were approaching something big from our past, previously never discussed—my throat started closing up and I felt as if I were going to pass out.
In a burst of formal manners I assume I used to try to cover my feelings, I said, “May I go to my husband?” and then I fled. I ran to Dario’s office, knowing the distress on my face was shouting, “Help me!” and then I ran to our nearest guest room and threw myself on the bed. I felt as though I were suffocating, I was crying so hard. Dario looked at me, wide-eyed, witnessing this eruption of years and years of feelings, and wordlessly held me until my crying began to subside. Eventually I pulled myself together and went back into the sleeping porch to resume the session.
In spite of the inexplicable terror I felt, and the considerable shame around not only having such big feelings, but feeling them in front of adult men (truly horrifying!), I did trust Ted and believed I was safe with him. Supported by him and yearning for growth in my life, I leaned into the fear and made another appointment with Dad. There was long-haul work to be done on this fragile relationship. I credit my dad enormously for his willingness to keep showing up for me, for his open-mindedness about participating in modern clinical therapy and practicing the tools Ted began teaching us.
I was able, for the first time, to tell my dad what growing up had been like for me and how often I was left alone—much of which shocked him. And I was allowed to tell him how his behavior while we were together (and apart) had made me feel. Ted remarked that my father was one of the best listeners he had ever encountered. Dad took it all in, occasionally offering observations, giving me more information (even about his own shortcomings), and asking questions, but never interrupting and never making excuses for himself, with weasel words like “Yeah, but …” or “What I really meant was …” He was thus able to validate the reality of my childhood perceptions, even though some of his had been very different from my own. My father gave me gift after gift, acknowledging with each recounted memory that his actions and inactions had devastated me many times.
I often discuss with friends from similar backgrounds what happens inside of us when our experiences growing up are minimized and denied by adults, both then and now. In response to the minimizing, we imbue our painful memories with even greater intensity, with anger that becomes rage, shame that becomes humiliation, and loneliness that becomes a hole in the soul. In short, the memories became indictments, of self and of others.
Ted had a huge assist from Dad. Aided by his utter lack of defensiveness, the nature, quality, and tone of what I did recall from childhood began to morph. My memories progressed from being an indictment to simply being a description. I was being taught ways to let go of my reactions to those who had wounded and neglected me and the carried emotions that had become toxic to me, and kept me isolated, especially from my dad. Even during our periodic truces, I had maintained a cautious mistrust, and kept him at arm’s length. Although the process we began with Ted would take time, I eventually began to realize he was back in my life for good this time. I began to trust him. I became my father’s daughter once more.
What I had understood about previous generations of our family had come from snippets of conversations with my grandparents and other family members, naturally filtered through my own subjectivity. Most of what I knew about my parents and my childhood was heavily dominated by my mother’s version of the story, which often differed sharply from how everyone else in my family remembered things. Their perceptions and memories were only whispers compared with Mom’s full-throated aria. My mother is a highly imaginative person who has always enjoyed a yarn. But I believe it was her darkly urgent need to protect the story of my sister’s paternity, which she had invented and perpetuated, and early childhood traumas of her own, that allowed very little room for my own or anyone else’s understanding of who we were and how we had arrived there. My own perceptions were molded, naturally, by the amount of time I spent with her, compared with my extremely limited exposure to my dad for years at a time.
When parents divorce, it’s not unusual that their kids become pawns in a sad game of resentment, accusations, and revenge. It is also not unusual for each parent to create a personalized narrative of what happened, who was at fault, how, and why. In spite of the tendency in each of my parents to paint the other as the “bad guy,” I have learned that in all relationships, both sides share pretty much equal responsibility, even when one’s actions are more visible and seem more egregious.
Mom certainly wanted to make everything Dad’s fault. Her role was to discredit him, create distance, make us distrust and maybe even hate him all the while hopefully building herself up. I believe that she needed to, given that he knew that he was not my sister’s father, and she feared that at any time, he might unload the truth, which for some reason she genuinely believed would be catastrophic for her and for my sister. Thus the obloquy she had begun back on Larrabee Street continued unabated throughout my childhood, and long into my adulthood, accusations that he never loved us, he never paid child support, he lied, he cheated. Mom’s campaign against Dad was often very successful. I absolutely internalized some of those attitudes toward my dad and, contaminated by her invective scripts, developed my own wariness toward him.
I was in my thirties before I was able to calmly evaluate for myself Mom’s version of events and come to my own peaceful conclusions. For instance, my mom had always told me that Dad didn’t want another baby when I was conceived, that he had even pressured her to have an abortion. However, that was not the way Dad remembered it. He had told me I was planned and wanted. I could not reconcile their completely different versions of the story of my place in this world until my wedding to Dario in 2001, when my parents were uneasily but amicably placed in the same room for the first time since I was in first grade and living at Camp Wig.
The celebrations took place at Skibo Castle in Scotland. I had been very assertive with Mom: Dad was invited, and there was nothing she could do about it. Even her default position of needing to “protect” my sister from him would not work. She did not have a vote in his attendance. I was just beginning to suspect that my mistrust of him was something I had inherited from others and not wholly organic. So I had a stern word with my key family members in advance, indicating that no bad behavior would be tolerated, and I felt reasonably comfortable that everyone on my side could “act right” for the occasion. Plus, I felt well defended when Dario threatened to physically throw anyone off the property who was out of line. Dario and I offered different moments during which toasts could be presented. Dad chose the parents dinner, a time when Dario, his folks, Mom and Pop, and Dad would be sharing a special, private meal. (Man, I think now, was I brave!) As the evening unfolded, I realized Dad’s toast was the story of how I was planned, and loved, when brought into this world. It was a stunning revelation for me, and to my astonishment, my mom, to her great credit and my benefit, did not contradict him.
“Diana and I talked about having another child,” Dad said in his toast. “I said, ‘We’re going to California, what do you think?’ She said, ‘Well, I’ll let you know.’ And the next night I came home and there was a candlelit dinner and a bottle of wine. Di, was it beef Stroganoff?”
“Lasagna,” my mother confessed.
I was gobsmacked. And I began to wonder what other things I had been taught to believe about myself and my father might be fabrications.
I continued to be surprised. Dad recalled our early years, of which I still have very little memory, as a “storybook father-and-daughter relationship.” Perhaps I had to wipe those recollections out of my consciousness in order to endure the long separations when I didn’t know whether or not he loved me. I continued to struggle to generate any connection with the times we had been close when I
was little. In our sessions with Ted, I did begin to remember more of the abandonment, which, however painful, was a necessary step toward healing.
There was a lot of ground to cover. We talked about those early years in Sylmar, California, which my mother had always said were so miserable for her. Dad was at ease remembering he was still in love with Mom during this time, although he thought they would have been better off choosing a different community in which to settle initially, one where Mom would have been less isolated. In pictures, my family looks normal, my mom in a pixie hairdo and short skirts, Dad in bell-bottoms with some gnarly sideburns, standing in front of goats at a petting zoo and at other family tourist attractions. I love the photos of my sister dressed up in her cowgirl outfit, strumming a tiny guitar with a harmonica in her mouth. My favorite video is of her appearing with flair from behind a curtain, performing a magical show, singing into a xylophone’s drumstick, giving a confident shimmy of her wee shoulders. The photos of me show a smiling, dark-eyed baby who seems well fed and well loved.
We talked about my earliest memories in Hollywood, and Dad filled in some of the gaps for me. After he left the house on Larrabee Street, moving to Manhattan Beach, Mom had told us that he was a good-for-nothing bum, or words to that effect, but in fact he was going to grad school at UCLA, earning a 3.89 average toward an MBA. (If his being in school came up, she cut that conversation short with a dramatic, “He cheated.”) But he never finished his master’s.
Mom and Dad’s divorce was final in 1974, and Dad requested, and was granted, a promotion and a move back to Chicago at the home office. He recalled that she asked him to come by before he left for Illinois, and over breakfast in a McDonald’s she said, “I want to tell you that you’re not Christina’s father.” He responded blithely, “Yeah, I know.” They had simply never discussed it before. Despite his suspicions, he had always unequivocally accepted my sister as his own daughter. For that one morning, there were no accusations, there was no acrimony. They finished breakfast, and he started up the new MGB he had bought for the trip to Illinois. “I drove off into the east into the sunrise, to a new job and hoping for a new life,” he said.
He came back fairly often to see us. Always one for an adventure, he took me on a long road trip up the Pacific Coast Highway, all the way to rural Oregon, just him and me in his MGB, making stops along the way to see friends. I was still in kindergarten, and Dad was engaged and caring, working on spelling lessons with me and patiently helping me learn to eat new foods, like yogurt, that I wouldn’t try at home. It was an interesting odyssey into the alternative lifestyles of the Pacific Northwest, circa 1974. My list of new experiences included sleeping in a yurt; stopping in on a friend, who happened to be in her hot tub, and thus seeing a grown woman who was not my mother topless; playing hide-and-seek after dark in a national park in which friends were squatting; watching a ten-year-old handily roll a joint; and various other oddities of the era. The trip became a mainstay classic of my show-and-tell performances.
My memories turn spottier and darker the next year, when, after the usual blissful summer with our grandparents, Mom moved us back to Kentucky and we lived on and off with Dad at Camp Wig, south of Lexington. Even at that tender age, I understood that my parents were not reviving their marriage, we were just grouping up for a while, trying to make the best of things. My feelings from that time are mostly of low-grade, chronic loneliness and fear, with hazy suggestions of a few good memories.
Along with the blackberry bushes and swimming holes at Camp Wig, I loved the cats we kept there. They were definitely pretty wild and free, so when they materialized, it was exciting. I remember them having ear mites and the like and my arms welting up from flea bites. But they were entertaining, and I could spend hours tracking them. My dad is a great cat lover, enjoying them with deep attachment, sensitivity, appreciation, respect, and humor. It’s something we have been able to share, and I enjoyed learning all about the cats he kept during the years we were not close, as they were such an important part of his life.
There were other, more disturbing memories from that time, though. The road from Lexington to Camp Wig was narrow, winding, with elevation changes, and had only a puny guardrail. Dad gave me rides on a borrowed motorcycle a few times, and I remember being very scared. The motorcycle did not have a backrest, and it felt as if the only thing preventing me from falling into the hollow, as we tipped from side to side, taking the curves, was the strength of my seven-year-old arms. To this day, I have an unreasonable fear of tipping. Nothing else, only tipping, and I know it is from being on that road. I am perfectly at ease in a car with my husband driving 170 miles an hour. I’ll sit cross-legged, giggling, popping Malteezes, a Scottish malted milk ball. I can go upside down on any roller coaster in the world (after multiple corn dogs, even). But I cannot ride a golf cart up a modestly sloping putting green or anything else that creates in me the sensation of tipping.
What happened after that year at Camp Wig was mainly lost to me. While I know facts, I don’t recall basic experiences. As I’ve said, my mother, sister, and I moved, without Dad, to Berea, an idyllic and creative town forty miles south of Lexington. But how did I land there? One day when we were visiting our grandparents, Mom came by and swooped us up. At our new home, Dad never came to visit, and no explanation was offered for his absence. He had vanished once more, establishing patterns of deeply traumatic, abrupt changes that scarred me. But once we began therapy, Dad informed me that Mom never told him we were moving. In a way, she had stolen us. He shared with me how he drove around central Kentucky feeling equal parts rage and despondency, looking for us until he found out weeks later where we lived. But he realized there was no point in confronting her about visiting us; she would just disappear with us again.
I had a strange physical experience as he described what had happened, a nonthinking, nonverbal sense of memory sluiced within my body. I felt my feet tingle on the floor on which they were placed, and a feeling of hyperreality buzzed through me, culminating in dizzy light-headedness. The more we talked, body memories such as this began to occur frequently, as my body confirmed that what my head was hearing made sense.
After our one year in Berea, in the lovely home on the hill, Mom’s next cross-country move was triggered by her mother asking her to testify against her dad in their divorce proceedings. Unable to figure out how to respond, how to set boundaries, she chose to flee.
My sister was furious at being uprooted from a place she had come to love, and she started acting out her anger on me during the drive to California. Mom and Uncle Mark had rented a U-Haul truck and laid a mattress in the back for our travel space for the 2,434–mile trip, propping open the rear door a foot to give us some air. During one long day of driving, in an inexplicable rage, my sister started climbing onto the high piles of furniture and boxes and jumping on me, then holding me down and licking my face until I was hysterical. Desperate for it to stop, I took off my small shirt and waved out the back of the trailer, trying to flag down some help. I was more afraid of my sister than of falling onto the interstate. Sister remembers that a state trooper pulled us over, and she received a humiliating spanking from our mild, kind uncle for being so cruel to me. I don’t remember most of it. I know it’s something she regrets deeply, and I have done what I can to help relieve her of her guilt. I regard her behavior, like that of every child, as a perfect reflection of the environment in which she was being raised. And just as I was in many ways not having my needs met, neither was she.
During our two years in Marin County, I don’t remember hearing from my father once. The few times I saw Dad at Mamaw and Papaw’s while living with them during summertime, I felt so awkward and shy around him. He acted as if we knew each other, but I wasn’t so sure. I don’t remember asking him why he had disappeared, and he doesn’t remember trying to explain. I recently asked Mom if I asked her about him, and she admitted she was so immersed in her own world that she doesn’t remember, either.
One of those summers, he showed up at Mamaw and Papaw’s in the MGB to take me on a road trip to see our wonderful cousins in Pennsylvania, and I felt very weird that I was going to be with him after not having seen him for at least a full year, which to a young child can seem like a lifetime. As we set out, he put something from a small gray film canister in his mouth, and when I asked what it was, he told me plainly it was speed. That was my dad’s way, being transparent, and plainspoken, thinking such honesty was the enlightened way to parent. Even though I was only nine or ten, I had been around enough drugs in my short life to know what amphetamines were. I was scared to death, and the speed seemed to fit the portrait of my dad painted by my mother, as well as my grandparents’ concern about his “lifestyle,” as they called it. When the MGB broke down in Catletsburg, only a few miles from Ashland, I was enormously relieved our trip had come to naught, feeling I had narrowly escaped something terrifying and would be safely returned to Morningside Drive.
Breaking into the entertainment business had become Mom’s obsession while we were living in California. One night she and Sister went to a Merle Haggard concert and managed to meet him in the parking lot. My mother is nothing if not beguiling and they ended up traveling with the great star on his tour bus for the next few days. I was left home alone during their escapade
I have pieced together that this sort of thing happened a lot. I tend only to recognize the absences when a story is being told about my family and one of the listeners will look at me and ask, “Where were you?” My mother and sister’s adventures, positive and negative, had so dominated my own life that I often had no idea where, in fact, I was while they were living theirs. I have put things together by asking family members and friends and doing childhood work with professional clinicians. So often when I start such work, guided back in time, giving that little girl who still lives in me a chance to express herself, the first thing out of my mouth, or the first thing I write, is, “Where is everybody?”