All That Is Bitter and Sweet

by Ashley Judd

  In addition to having Nana, my beloved Mamaw and Papaw were of course nearby, prior to and after they came home from their usual winter in Florida. I could go there for breakfast. I could stop by every day after school. This, for me, was nothing short of heaven. It was what I had been trying to organize, manipulate, connive, and make happen my entire life; I had begged, in many ways, many times, to be allowed to live in eastern Kentucky. I finally was, and I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it saved my life.

  I had one year of being a normal teenager. I confess that I had a Miami Vice poster taped to my bedroom wall. I fell in love with the movie Out of Africa, listened to Billie Holiday records and U2’s first album, and dated a smart, kind, delightful boy. And once again I loved going to class. I went from nearly failing geometry at Sayre to finishing eighth in my class at Paul G. Blazer High School—the same school my mother had attended twenty-two years ago.

  I had known I wanted a higher education since I first learned to spell the word “college.” But when the time had come to apply to schools during my senior year in high school, I was flummoxed by the process. I remember sitting at my Nana Judd’s kitchen table in Ashland, struggling over the forms. My godmother, Piper, had stepped into the breach, providing an effective adult presence in my life in the area of higher education. When no one else was paying attention, it was she who adamantly insisted that not going to college was not an option. She supervised everything, right down to making sure I had asked people for letters of recommendation. Nana was supportive, too, as I struggled to find a suitable topic for my essays. But even with Piper’s firm guidance, I bungled much of the process, in part because of the heavy burden of shame that undermined my every step. There was a severe internal critic that told me I was not good enough to go to the schools that teachers had suggested and which Piper expected of me. I sabotaged myself to the extent that I didn’t mail in most of my applications on time. I had my heart set on the University of Virginia, which was the only application I actually mailed, but I didn’t make the cut. So I hastily applied to the University of Kentucky and was accepted into the class of 1990. As it turned out, it was the best choice of all.

  This period of reaclamation was deep. But it was not perfect. It was embedded in the broader family context of ongoing, untreated addiction and dysfunction. I rarely saw my mother and sister, who had progressed in their increasingly unhealthy relationship, which was exacerbated by their professional success and their cojoined lifestyle on the road. My grandparents still were unfriendly with each other. But they all declared a truce and attended my party at Nana’s house to celebrate my high school graduation. The only one missing was Dad.

  My father and I remained estranged for years. In college, I would occasionally run into him at my favorite Mexican restaurant, High on Rose, and because he was my dad, I would reflexively go to him, expecting to speak to him. He would be terribly chilly to me, and I couldn’t understand why. When a sorority sister with whom I did most of my running around commented that she did not like the way my dad treated me, I realized that hey, maybe it wasn’t so good. I had accepted unacceptable behavior for so long, from so many, I didn’t know that I had the right not to tolerate it. He shared that we ran into each other once on an airplane and another time at the Breeders’ Cup, and that both times we passed each other without a word. Sister made an effort in fits and starts to keep up with Dad—occasionally inviting him to concerts (which caused massive drama between Mom and her) and taking him along to meet the Rolling Stones, a band he’d always loved. When he was around, I had no idea what to say, think, feel, or do.

  After making an indelible debut when I was in high school, the Judds rocketed to superstardom during my college years in a story that is by now a familiar staple of country music lore. Suffice it to say that I was content to stay out of their spotlight, celebrating and enjoying their successes mostly from a distance. Sometimes I would join them on the road for a date or two, and everyone made me feel welcomed. In spite of the considerable hardship offstage and what their music cost me emotionally, I was always tremendously proud of the Judds. The band welcomed me warmly, and I enjoyed hanging out at the crew meal after watching soundcheck, which I made a point of attending. I loved listening to my sister, relaxed and carefree in this setting, experiment vocally and musically, reprising the Joni Mitchell and Bonnie Raitt sounds I had grown up listening to her sing in her bedroom. In these informal performances, I glimpsed the vocal virtuosity and commanding stage presence that would eventually characterize her solo career, and lead reviewers to declare her “Elvis-like” and the “greatest voice since Patsy Cline.”

  Come evening I loved attending shows, slipping out into a sold-out arena just as the lights went down, feeling the crowd’s excitement, and watching, with deep pleasure, the joy my mother and sister brought to tens of thousands people each concert. I had my own favorite songs and waited to hear how my sister would hit certain notes, appreciating creative treatments she would give signature Judd licks, especially savoring the bluesy numbers that really showed off her remarkable voice. I beamed when folks recognized their favorite songs, watching women cut loose to “Girls’ Night Out,” loving it when couples wrapped their arms around each other’s waists on “Love Is Alive,” and laughing at the bit in “Mama He’s Crazy” when some poor fool of a man near the front would be put on the spot to sing into my mother’s microphone. After shows, I would sleep with my sister on her pull-out sofa bed, and some of my fondest memories are of those calm nights after electrifying shows, reading Ellen Gilchrist and Flannery O’Connor to her, with her little dog, Loretta Lynn, curled up with us, Mom up front in the jump seat looking at “life’s highway,” as she called it, eating her nightly bowl of popcorn with Banjo by her side as the miles rolled by.

  Mom slowed down a bit after she discovered in 1990, while I was a senior in college, that she had contracted hepatitis C, a chronic, potentially fatal liver disease. The Judds embarked on an emotional farewell tour, after which Wynonna had to launch a solo career. My sister was bereft, while also stunningly successful. I continued to participate from the distant sidelines, as usual. I found that tour to be an especially histrionic one, and in general I didn’t enjoy the drama. I had already had too much of it.

  Mom’s semiretirement from recording and touring gave her some time on her hands, and she used it to write her memoirs. In 1993, the whole life story that she had invented for herself and told to others for years was suddenly put out there in black and white. Love Can Build a Bridge was Naomi Judd’s self-portrait as a quirky but lovable single mom who became a star after overcoming great hardships while raising her two daughters by herself, after being abandoned by her no-good husband. The problem was some of it was simply false, and often what was not patently false was at least hotly disputed by family members, who remembered things very differently.

  For instance, in the book she described the heartbreaking time when her beloved brother Brian was diagnosed with lymphoma when he was fifteen and she was seventeen. She named the doctor who saw Brian and the type of cancer: reticulum cell sarcoma. She said that her parents made the trip to Ohio with Brian and left her home alone so that she could attend the first day of her senior year. She described the clothes she laid out the night before and the sharpened pencils and notebooks lined up on the dresser. But she did not name the boy who came over that night and, she wrote, “took advantage” of her emotional vulnerability and also took her virginity. By omission, she implied yet again that her occasional boyfriend Michael Ciminella caused her pregnancy.

  Unfortunately for everyone concerned, not only did Dad know the truth, but by now so did almost everybody else in our family—and in Ashland, Kentucky. It was an open secret. I remember one family friend, thinking it was normal chitchat, pulling an Ashland High School yearbook off the shelf to show me Charlie Jordan’s class picture, commenting on how much my sister favored him. But astoundingly, unbelievably, none of us had ever told Sister. She was almost thir
ty years old and she still didn’t know that her biological father was Mom’s old boyfriend Charlie.

  When Dad was interviewed by Mom’s collaborator for her memoir, he was put back on his heels to learn the extent of the unflattering things she had been saying about him. He realized that his relationships with his daughters had been poisoned since we were little girls, and he wanted to set the record straight. And he was particularly disturbed that Wynonna still didn’t know the truth about her paternity. Dad had always thought that Sister should be told, but he’d decided it was her mother’s place to tell her.

  Finally, with Mom’s book coming out, he decided that the lie had gone too far and that he had to tell Sister himself.

  I, too, was tired of all the lying and secret keeping. I occasionally went to family therapy with my mother and sister—something, I have to say, from which I gained minimal benefit, in spite of my fondness for “Joanie,” the practitioner. (I still puzzle over why she didn’t diagnose the addictions or suggest treatment.) But during one such appointment, my mother and sister started arguing about whether Dad should be invited to a concert—the kind of classic power struggle of wounded wills that had destroyed so much of our home life. I watched, really seeing for the first time. For some reason, I didn’t feel so overwhelmed with my own debilitating frustration, helplessness, and pain, and thus I suddenly saw in stark relief the neon pink elephant with a frilly tutu dancing wildly in the room: the Lie. With detachment, I saw the extraordinary energy, the wile, the brilliance, really, that Mom had employed in maintaining the Lie. I knew that for my part, it had to stop. I would soon be done keeping toxic secrets.

  The decision to tell Sister was gaining critical mass. Dad attempted to speak to her after she and Mom sang at the 1994 Super Bowl halftime show, but Mom caught wind of his plan and made sure Sister was never alone with him. Mother continued to be tortured by a powerful belief that she would be destroyed if Sister found out, bolstered by her conviction that if she should be told the truth, my sister would need to be “institutionalized.” Dad called Joanie to set up a meeting with my sister so that he could divulge this momentous news in a safe setting.

  The night before their appointment, I had a spiritual experience. I remembered the scripture “The truth shall set you free.” I realized it was faith-in-action time. God is everything, or God is nothing. I shared my certainty with Mom.

  “Tell her,” I said plainly, flatly, directly, “or I will.” I felt hopeful and sensed freedom was nigh. I had faith beyond the fear.

  When Dad arrived at Joanie’s, he was surprised to find Mom’s car parked next to Sister’s. He had been trumped. Mother had booked the appointment prior to his, and I came along to enforce the disclosure. On that day, I made the best decision I knew and decided that my sister was more important than my parents’ court-style intrigue and machinations. What mattered to me was being there for my sister, whichever parent told her.

  We sat in Joanie’s office in silence, except for the sound of our mother sobbing. Sister was wondering if she had been summoned to hear more bad news about Mom’s hepatitis. I was in my detached, hyper-rational watching mode again. I was given the gift of some patience, and I waited a while. It eventually seemed clear that it was up to me, because Mom could not go through with telling her. In a strange way, I was happy to have this sober responsibility. I knew … I knew … it was right.

  “Dad is not your biological father,” I said. “Your father is named Charlie Jordan.”

  Mom sobbed and crawled on her knees across the office, burying her head in my sister’s lap.

  Sister blurted out something about how this made perfect sense to her and explained some important things she had never been able to figure out. Mother sobbed harder. I watched as my sister’s wheels began to turn, as she began rapidly to process, to finally arrange this information in a way that fit together the puzzle pieces that had been maddeningly scattered her entire life.

  In her memoir, Sister wrote, “I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t sad. I wasn’t anything. And I belonged to no one. I felt like I was in a space between earth and hell. I looked at Ashley and saw the pain on her face.… This kind of sorrow never truly goes away. It was devastating for all three of us.”

  Although I am not sure it was devastating for me, I was immensely sorry for the years of unnecessary anguish she had endured, all that the lying and evading had cost her. I was sorry, as well, for how much maintaining the Lie had consumed our mother and what it had caused her to do to our dad, her compulsive need to demonize him. Although I imagined her knowing would be an uneven journey, with aftershocks and powerfully mixed emotions, and I couldn’t know how long it would take for there to be acceptance and peace, I knew discarding the lie was a major improvement and held great promise.

  Dad says that when he arrived for his appointment, the receptionist told him to wait a bit. Then he, Joanie, and Sister had some time together.

  “I’ve just been with Mom and Ashley,” she told him. “Ashley told me.”

  “Well, now maybe we can develop a relationship based on truth,” he said.

  As you can imagine, there was a great deal of healing to do in our family after that day. Sister and Dad began to build a relationship, having a lot of fun with each other along the way, until they stopped speaking to each other in 1997 after a falling-out over an unrelated matter. Sadly, that’s the way it has always been with our family: one step forward and two steps back.

  Chapter 14

  SHADES OF HOPE

  My grandmother of choice, Tennie “Mennie” McCarty, and me at my Harvard graduation.

  One cannot begin to learn that which one thinks one already knows.

  —EPICTETUS

  hrough my sessions with Ted, I was beginning to understand the roots of the depression and behavior disorders that had caused me grief for most of my life. At the same time, my sister was moving toward healing in her own way. As she has said in many public forums, her own painful childhood has fueled an array of problems in her adult life, including a life-threatening eating disorder. Finally, she decided to do something no one in our family had ever done before: seek help for her addictions. It was an enormously brave step, one that would help all of us begin to push back individually and collectively against the inherited, multigenerational dysfunction that often dominated our lives.

  In January 2006, my sister checked herself into rehab at a residential treatment center called Shades of Hope, in the tiny town of Buffalo Gap, Texas. Until then, I had no idea what went on in treatment. Actually, I did not know what rehab was. I had no idea that alcoholism and other addictions were diseases. I didn’t even know my sister suffered from something called compulsive overeating: I just thought she liked to snack, and I certainly didn’t know it threatened her life. I knew a tiny bit about AA from Colleen, the woman who had befriended me in eleventh grade, when I lived mostly on my own in my dad’s apartment. But I had never heard of Al-Anon, which helps friends and families of alcoholics, or Overeaters Anonymous. I mean, for being thirty-seven years old in modern America and someone who’s generally interested in my own well-being, I was completely ignorant about addiction and recovery.

  The inpatient program at Shades of Hope lasts forty-two days. During the fifth week of treatment, the family of the patient is strongly encouraged to visit the facility to partake in “family week”—five days of supporting their loved one, which includes evaluating one’s own responses and role in the family system and learning about solutions and tools. When I was invited to attend Sister’s family week, I took a look at the schedule they emailed to me and picked out one day that looked kind of interesting. I called Cam, the administrator, and said, “Okay, great. I’ll be there Wednesday.”

  “No,” she said, “it’s really important you be here for the whole five days.”

  “Wait a minute, do you have any idea …” I sighed, then explained my work and travel commitments and my husband’s schedule and how it was impossible to cough up five days o
n short notice.

  It was suggested that I call the owner, and I was given her home number. I let that rub me the wrong way. I was already thinking, Oh, is my family being treated as special and different? Call the owner at home? What’s up with that? I generally do not appreciate my family being singled out for special attention. Much of our lives have been lived in public since I was a teenager. Stories about the scrappy, struggling single mom, her musical, rebellious daughter, and the constant bickering and fighting between them became integral to the act, the dysfunction became part of the family “brand,” and it’s often been exploited—internally and externally—to my detriment. Additionally, anything we did in public—a movie, a meal after church—became the Judds making an appearance, and I resented the way my mother and sister could not set and maintain boundaries with fans but just welcomed them into what should have been a moment of family time. I have at times also grown terribly weary of the copious amounts of misinformation that have become part of the Judd canon. I once attempted to correct a gross inaccuracy printed in an interview I gave to a British publication. The editor in chief of the magazine responded, “This information is on The Times microfiche. We will not change it.” The family myths were increasingly entrenched and apparently incorrigible.

  So I was fixing for an argument when I called the home, and a gentleman named R.L. answered the phone. I love country people and rural accents, and he had one of the best I’d ever heard in my life. But it didn’t make me feel any more confident about Shades of Hope. These people are trained professionals? What is this place? I was thinking, quite unfairly, while R.L. went to fetch his wife. Then another voice came on the phone, as soft and dry as a West Texas breeze. “Hi, I’m Tennie. And I want you to know how much it means for you to be here.…” Before I knew what had happened to me, I had been charmed. I was arriving on Sunday and leaving on Friday. What’s more, I was excited about it.