by Ashley Judd
I spent another joyful, mostly carefree summer after fourth grade with my grandparents, but this time my sister stayed in California while she and Mom worked on their act. I missed her, but I flourished under the attentive care of both sets of grandparents. I guess my mother and sister had a promising summer, because I would later learn Mom decided Sister, who was only in eighth grade, would not be entering high school in the fall, so that the two of them could pursue Mom’s burgeoning quest to make something special out of her life. I would hear snippets from family and in some cases friends, such as my old pal from Hollywood, Gabrielle, who wrote that my mom and sister had crashed with her mom and her for a while in L.A., and often fought terribly in their small apartment. I later learned they also spent time working on their act and hanging out with musicians in Las Vegas and Austin. As for me, one evening toward the end of August, the phone rang, and Mamaw answered it in the kitchen. After a few moments, she told me to go play outside. I was climbing our wonderful big friendly tree in the front yard when she came out and said, “Ashley, you’re not going back to California to live with your mother and sister. You’re going back to the river to live with your dad.” She was clearly upset. I went and sat on the side stoop, stumped. I hadn’t spent any time with, much less lived with my dad in years.
Mamaw told me she and Papaw wanted to keep me there and wondered how I would feel about that. I was surprised they wanted me—that anyone wanted me—and I naturally loved the idea. I had often fantasized about it. They really wanted to keep me, and it was the first of several conversations we would have about me living there with them. But Dad wanted me, too. He and Mom had been having a drag-out fight in court, where she was suing him for back child support. He told me that although he keenly wanted both of us girls to come live with him, Mom was wholly uncooperative. Sensing a possible compromise, he offered to make her a deal: “I’ll give you $2,000 if you give me Ashley.” Mom took the money.
I had deeply ambivalent feelings about being with Dad again. He was still living the bachelor-hippie leather worker life at Camp Wig. It was clear Mamaw and Papaw did not fully approve of his choices, and I was very aware of their unspoken attitude and concern. They were classic American dreamers, having arrived in the upper middle class through hard work, self-employment, and flawless respectability. Dad was a creative free spirit, and his way of life seemed a bit scandalous to them.
The morning I was leaving Morningside Drive, I stuffed as much of Mamaw’s costume jewelry as I could into the many pockets of my blue jeans—I have no idea why, except that perhaps I wanted to take a piece of her with me or to control something, anything, pushing back against my obvious powerlessness in the family. Or maybe I wanted to squirrel something away that I could look forward to later, anticipating I would be lonely, imagining bringing each item out, one by one, remembering the fun times I’d had with Mamaw. Our two-hour ride was quiet, each mile deepening the silence as we drew closer to parting. Papaw was so mad about leaving me in a situation he feared was not appropriate for me, about not getting to keep me I recall he wouldn’t pull the car into the long driveway or set foot in the yard at Camp Wig. Mamaw walked me to the house, and when it was time to say goodbye, she turned to me and searched my face, giving me a chance to come clean. Eventually she said, “Ashley, I would give you anything I have. You don’t have to take it from me.” I reached into my pockets and handed my grandmother her things. I was devastated that I had hurt and betrayed her and was very ashamed of myself. I have always thought the way she handled this moment exemplified her dignity and grace.
My first months back at Camp Wig were indeed very lonely. I remember playing alone every day after school, sitting in my austere room, trying to pretend it was comfortable, that I liked it and that it was my “own.” I had a stiff plastic horse that I played with on the windowsill, and I tried futilely for a short while to read music out of a collection of Peter, Paul and Mary songs. At the same time, Dad treated me well and was committed to parenting me as best he knew how. For a while, I had a father again. He fed me hearty bowls of oatmeal with raisins and honey in beautiful hand-thrown pottery every morning. It was delicious, but I had a hard time telling him that the breakfast didn’t stick to my bones long enough and that I needed him to pack me a lunch and a snack because I became hungry again every day well before lunch, which made me struggle in school.
Whenever I went into of my “spells” of depression, the ones I’d been having since I was eight, I would become mute, limp, and lethargic. I would be frozen in some intractable silence that I could not break out of. Dad would ask me what was on my mind, trying to draw me out to find out what was wrong. He would attempt to reason things out with me, to encourage me to speak, to describe my feelings. This line of questioning was so perlexing to me, so foreign, I would stall and often went to one default word: “Mom.” I also could not understand how he, a grown-up who should have known how things worked, could possibly have expected me to be verbal in that condition. Didn’t he know I was down a deep, dark well, where no talking could take place? Also, he tells me that sometimes I was so angry, I would just stand there in front of him and shake or bite my arm—my sister has told me this, too—and I could never articulate what I was angry about. (Dad and I now both know that depression is anger turned in upon oneself, but at the time, neither of us had a clue what was going on.)
But at least he was there. He sat on the edge of my bed when my first little boyfriend broke up with me, saying, “Poor baby, poor baby.” (Of course, I recognize now that the level of grief I experienced had little to do with the boy and everything to do with retriggering major feelings of abandonment.) Dad was also great with me when I returned the five-dollar bill I had pinched from his wallet. He recognized the risk I had taken by being honest with him and rewarded me with his joy, kneeling in front of me and even crying a bit over my truthfulness, which was a revelation. With Mom, the punishment rarely fit the crime, and even telling the truth earned a spanking, additional grounding, or worse, the dreaded “silent violence” of more neglect.
We had some good times living like river rats along the Kentucky that fall. Dad had made a lot of improvements to Camp Wig. He was growing weary of eating peanut butter and living the life of a starving artist, so he cut his hair and started selling advertising for Blood Horse magazine in Lexington, which bills itself “the Horse Capital of the World.” I enjoyed our drives to and from Lexington, now in a proper car, Mamaw and Papaw’s salmon pink Imperial, loaned to us while they wintered in Florida. I played with the myriad fancy buttons just as I did on the long road trip vacations on which they took me every summer. Dad and I listened to National Public Radio, and there was a sense of routine, even though the loneliness never left me. I didn’t reconnect with the little girls I had known on the river back in first grade, and the kids at the private school I now attended were culturally and physically far removed from Camp Wig. I never had a friend over, or stayed with one, for that matter. So once school let out every afternoon, it was just Dad and me. Sometimes he couldn’t pick me up on time, and he arranged with the school for me to hang out in a classroom until he could fetch me. There was one other boy, a bit older, who was in the same predicament, but we never spoke to each other. I just remember his preppy shoes and figured he was “better” than I.
I was also uncomfortable with Dad’s occasional girlfriends, who sometimes came to the river and spent the night. Once, when he had a date to spend the night with a girlfriend in Lexington, he took me along. I recall feeling insanely weird sleeping in the strange home, knowing we were there so my dad could be romantic and sexual with his date. When I thought it was about time to wake up for school, I went looking for my dad and walked in on them having sex. On the way to school, Dad said, “Well, now you know why we spent the night in town.” The “ick” factor for me was stratospheric in this department, as it would be for most fifth-grade girls. Dad says he was motivated to be honest and open about the human body and sexuality because h
e had zero sex education as a child. But, as with many of my parents’ choices, he realizes now his open attitude about nudity and sexual information was an overcorrection. While he absolutely meant well, it did not have the desired effect; it repelled me.
Eventually, strip coal mining up in the hills caused so much erosion and flash flooding that the camp flooded for good. With the river rising in our house, we had to escape in the middle of the night to a Red Cross shelter. Camp Wig was a total loss, so we moved in with one of my friends from my school, Fielding, and her mother, Willie. Fielding and I shared a room as if we were sisters and slept in matching twin beds, which I thought were grand. I helped her little brother Austin pick out his Garanimals in the morning, and I felt responsible and needed. The house was a beautiful old Victorian, with gorgeous porches and fish scale tiles in deep colors. To me it felt almost like being a family, something “normal,” which I craved: a mother figure, a dad, and some kids who could play and hang out together. Fielding and I sat in a living room nook playing backgammon. I did not understand the nature of my dad’s relationship with Willie, which had initially been romantic and then was not. He confided in me that he wearied of her leaning on him, but I didn’t really care and didn’t want more insider scoop on the adult dramas. He picked me up from school on Wednesdays and took me to the ice-cream parlor near Rupp Arena and let me eat a hot-fudge sundae while I told him about my day. Those were the sorts of things that mattered to me.
Meanwhile, Mom and Sister were busy hanging out with the musicians they met as they rambled around the country, practicing their singing, trying to find their entry and niche in show business. Soon, I received a letter from my mother in which she told me that she and Sister had changed their names. Mom picked “Naomi,” a name she admired from the Bible. In court, she had retaken Judd as her last name. Furthermore, Christina Claire Ciminella was no longer; her new name was Wynonna Judd. I lay on the floor practicing how to spell it and say it. Why. No. Nah. Now that they were the Judds, things were changing with them, and it seemed I no longer had a place in their world—or any other world, for that matter. I had just turned eleven.
Chapter 13
DELIVERANCE
Homemade modeling shots Mom took of me, age 13.
You lie, a small knuckle on my white bed;
lie, fisted like a snail, so small and strong
at my breast. Your lips are animals; you are fed
with love. At first, hunger is not wrong.
—ANNE SEXTON, “Unknown Girl in a Maternity Ward”
n 1979, when I was finishing fifth grade, Mom decided to stop wandering around the country with Sister and settle in Nashville, Tennessee, where most of the country music labels were based. After four months in motels and house-sitting for friends, she rented a small, hundred-year-old farmhouse on Del Rio Pike in the town of Franklin, a forty-five-minute drive south of Nashville, and arranged with Dad to take me back. He was becoming more involved in the world of thoroughbred racing and would soon be moving to Florida to work for a promotion. They had apparently agreed to share custody again, letting each other take me during alternate years. I had no knowledge of their conversations or their plans for me.
And so, at the end of my typically nurturing and sustaining summer with my grandparents, with days spent at the pool, trips to the Ohio State Fair, hot afternoons spent helping Papaw Judd at his filling station, Papaw Judd and Cynthia, whom he married after his divorce became final, informed me that instead of returning me to Dad in Lexington, they would be taking me to Tennessee to live with Mom.
I don’t remember that reunion, only the drive, lying in the backseat of Papaw’s Buick feeling scared and intensely sad. They dropped me off at an I-65 exchange in Brentwood, Tennessee, where Mom met them.
The transition was very hard on me. The farmhouse on Del Rio wasn’t ready for us yet, so Mom was still house-sitting while she worked during the day as a receptionist at a firm on Music Row. I spent my first night with Mom, whom I hadn’t seen since Christmas and before that, the previous May, in a strange house. When I woke up, I was alone. I fell into my deepest depressive spell to date and commenced sleeping around the clock, waking up only to watch a few shows on TV, such as The Price Is Right. I would search this stranger’s house, and when I found products mentioned on the show, I would clean the living room, interacting with the happy people on TV or pretending to be in a commercial. Once the soap operas came on, which I did not understand, I would go back to sleep. I remember waking up and not knowing if it was dawn, day, dusk, or night or how many days had passed. I remember Mom coming in to check on me a few times, partially waking up while she sat there for a minute. I do not recall us interacting much during those moments. I do not know how long this lasted; I do not recall moving into Del Rio. I don’t remember my sister being at this house. Maybe she was; maybe I was so depressed that I can’t remember. (Or maybe Papaw and Cynthia took her to Kentucky for her own visit with grandparents.) My memories of her begin only at the next house at which we house-sat. I can’t recall if I was happy to see her or how we greeted each other. I just recall that she sat on the back porch learning to play Rickie Lee Jones’s “Chuck E.’s in Love.” Then there is another hole in my memory, and it resumes when I am lying in bed in my new room on Del Rio, and I can hear Mom hanging the few pictures we owned, arranging our familiar things, including a few family pieces such as Grandmommy Burton’s sideboard, in such a way as to make a home.
I entered the sixth grade at Grassland Elementary School, while Wynonna, after her hiatus, was finally starting high school at Franklin High. Early on, we used to do the laundry together at a laundromat I still pass often, and once when Sister and I were folding towels, she cracked, “If you are going to live with us, you have to fold the towels our way.” I guess I had picked up a different technique over the years, spending time in so many different households. How did Mamaw fold? Nana? Cynthia? Dad? Willie Wood? So hypervigilant and unsure of where I belonged, I took my sister’s remark very seriously, believing that one wrongly folded towel and I’d be turned out to live somewhere else.
I continued to fantasize about moving to Ashland to live with my grandparents, but neither of my parents would abide the idea. Over the years, both sets of grandparents had been concerned enough about my living arrangements, yet they never managed to form a full alliance to actually rescue me from my chaotic, nomadic life. Once, even my aunt Margaret hired a lawyer to discuss the possibility of obtaining custody of me, which he explained a judge would never grant. Both my parents were living, and he said she wouldn’t stand a chance. She still looks at me with soft regret, offering her apologies that she couldn’t help when I needed it, and only when I was in good recovery did I stop wondering about how different—how much better—my life could have been if my grandparents had succeeded in adopting me.
Cynthia and Papaw Judd started talking about adopting me as soon as they learned Mom wanted me back again. I would have loved nothing better. They lived right down the street from a school, and I used to walk to it after dark, and in the very picture of a forlorn lost child, wrap my slim fingers in the fence, staring longingly at the playground and buildings, imagining that it was my school, that I had just walked there from my home with my grandparents, after a hot breakfast they had cooked for me (Papaw Judd made a mean country breakfast), and sat at the kitchen table eating with me while we talked about my upcoming day. Cynthia knew Mom needed money and told Papaw Judd the way to make this happen was to pay Mom $10,000 for me. Before they could make arrangements, Papaw’s kidneys failed, related to his alcoholism, and he had a transplant. The medical process was not near what it is now, and he was a sick man off and on for his remaining years, making incessant trips to Lexington for his complex care. He admitted to Cynthia that he was too sick to keep me. I am still so grateful to Cynthia for how very well she took care of my grandfather. She was a faithful caregiver until he died, and it does help knowing they had wanted me.
My feelings ab
out where I actually belonged in the world fluctuated even within my peer group. I had friends from a grade above me, and in my frantic attempt to be accepted, I tried to gain their approval by “acting big” and carrying on the way they did, which at times included smoking cigarettes and behaving like a cool teenager. I was devastated when friends my own age rejected me as being “too fast.” But by now I had no idea what it meant to be “normal.”
Mom took nursing jobs to pay the rent, eventually settling into a three p.m. to eleven p.m. shift at Williamson County Hospital. I nagged her to switch to the seven a.m. to three p.m. shift so I could see her sometimes. She explained those were popular shifts and gave other reasons why she would stay on the three p.m. to eleven p.m. I rarely saw her except on weekends, when she would often fry chicken in an old family skillet, which I loved taking cold in my lunch on Monday mornings. My sister and I occasionally bonded in our shared neglect. She could take good care of me, being protective and fun, letting me do her civics homework for her or be around her friends (both of which I loved), but she could also turn domineering and crabby, hollering at me from her bed to bring her a glass of something to drink so she could take her asthma medicine. I would take her water, but she didn’t want water. I’d take her milk, but she didn’t want milk, either. She wanted juice, and when I brought it, I would be released from my butler duties to resume whatever I had been doing that she had felt entitled to interrupt.