River of Time

by Naomi Judd

  I didn’t want to give it time. I was obsessed with getting to go home. Larry and Ashley felt differently. So did Dr. Mona Lisa. At a family conference with the Vanderbilt psychiatrist and his staff I heard that they all agreed that it was high time for me to take a long look at the legacy of mental illness in my family of origin and face all the dark secrets. They wanted me to be all the way well and not merely suppressing these shadows that had been displacing my sun for almost two years. I was still so buried under by Seroquel that I couldn’t even speak to join their conversations regarding my future. With trepidation, I decided that I would have to comply with their wishes. After all, I thought, nothing could be more of a nightmare than this past month at Vanderbilt. I was dead wrong.

  Chapter 10

  The Trauma Egg

  Ironically, the shell of the former Naomi Judd who left Vanderbilt Psychiatric Hospital was now entering an intensive monthlong program in Scottsdale, Arizona, that implements a method of treatment starting with what’s called the Trauma Egg, followed by other therapies.

  Larry, Ashley, Dr. Mona Lisa, and the professional staff at Vanderbilt were well aware I would feel trapped and terrified by my lack of freedom if I had to live in another hospital environment. Any inpatient program was going to make me spiral downward, which is why they recommended the outpatient program in Scottsdale, Psychological Counseling Services. It was agreed that Larry and I would stay in a nearby inn together at night while I attended eight hours of daily therapy at their facility.

  The therapists at PCS guided me to take a deep look at, and come to terms with, the curse of mental illness handed down from past generations. My personalized therapy plan was to begin by taking an inventory of past difficult emotional experiences and traumas that had shaped my personal belief system.

  I learned that your current beliefs are based on your early life experiences and the memories and perceptions you have formed. On a large sheet of paper they had me draw an egg that represented a clean slate, me at birth. This is called the “Trauma Egg.” Beginning with my very first memories of traumatic experiences, the therapist had me write them down chronologically from my earliest memory, at the bottom of the egg, continuing on to my current life.

  My first traumatic memory that I put on the paper was of being sick with chicken pox and being molested by Uncle Charlie at Grandmommy Judd’s house at age three and a half. As I ascended though my childhood years, other memories of molestation attempts by Uncle Charlie came to the surface of my consciousness. I had a difficult time writing them on the egg without my hands trembling. I had never told anyone in fifty-five years.

  The next memory that returned to me was of being at my aunt Pauline’s farm, Little Catt, at about age five. This was usually a place I felt safe, because it was in the middle of nowhere. There was no indoor plumbing, only a well in back of the house and a wood-burning stove in the front room used for heat. To bathe, we had to pump water from the well and then warm it on the woodstove. The outhouse was about fifty feet from the house and it sure was a long walk on chilly mornings. Aunt Pauline, a true Appalachian countrywoman, raised chickens, milked her cows, and had a big vegetable garden. She never went to a doctor. She grew herbs to use as medicine and made every meal from scratch. There was no such thing as a boxed cake mix at Aunt Pauline’s.

  As a child, my parents would allow me to stay with her for a week, especially during the summer. During those days I would rarely see another human being since Aunt Pauline’s farm was on a rough dirt road. I would roam to my heart’s content on the many acres of Catt Farm, singing to myself and making up fanciful stories, usually accompanied by one or two of Aunt Pauline’s many dogs. I had invented an imaginary playmate named Elizabeth. She was angelic and lived in the dense woods at the edge of Aunt Pauline’s property. She became a very real presence for me, assuring me that I was special and would make it in life. She said everything I wished my mother had said.

  The interior of Aunt Pauline’s house was as plain as an Amish homestead. No pictures adorned the walls, not even a single photograph of a family member. One simple calendar, given away free at the feed store every Christmas, hung on a nail. There were no rugs on the bare-wood plank floors. Every pot, pan, brush, and blanket in the house was something that was useful. I never saw a single knickknack, flower vase, or decorative pillow in her house. Even the outside bird feeders were made from hubcaps that had dislodged from occasional passing cars when they hit the potholes on the dirt road in front of the farmhouse. Aunt Pauline would hammer the hubcaps to the top of the fence posts and fill them with suet for the cardinals. She would predict the weather by how much the cardinals were feeding and by what time the grazing animals headed for the barn.

  If I heard a car on the road, I would run out of the house to see if it was someone who was going to stop. They would always just drive on by. Aunt Pauline preferred it that way. I didn’t understand until I was well into adulthood that she was gripped by severe agoraphobia, as were three of her sisters: Evelyn, Ramona, and Faith. Only my father’s fourth sister, Aunt Toddie, managed to escape the mentally ill Judd household, get married to a wonderful man, and raise her three kids, somehow bypassing the crippling emotional and mental problems of her sisters.

  Aunt Pauline only went into town if absolutely necessary, which was about once a month for supplies. It was almost impossible for her to talk to people she didn’t know very well. One day a truck did pull in at Aunt Pauline’s farm. But it was no one I wanted to see. It was Uncle Charlie. As he approached the house, I ran and hid, lying down between the rows of corn in the garden until he left. Later that week he came back again, but I wasn’t aware of his arrival. I had no time to hide. I couldn’t comprehend why Aunt Pauline wasn’t afraid of him, too. She didn’t seem to worry about having Uncle Charlie around. I couldn’t possibly know that he wasn’t interested in adult women, only tiny girls he could overpower, intimidate, and then threaten.

  As soon as Aunt Pauline left the house to pull onions in the garden, Uncle Charlie came looking for me and cornered me in the bedroom. He tried to coax me toward him, like the friendly great-uncle. I remember being so confused, but I knew I couldn’t trust him. I tried to bolt past him for the door, but he grabbed my arm. As soon as his hands were on me he tried to pull my clothes off.

  Even though I was now only a kindergartener, I pointed at his face and squinted my eyes the way I had seen dueling cowboys do on the westerns Daddy loved to watch on TV.

  “Don’t touch me! I will tell my daddy. He has a gun. My daddy will kill you.”

  I have no idea how I had the moxie to make such a bold threat to him, but there was something inside me that knew cowering in fear wasn’t going to help in the long run. I had to save myself, again. And I did. He let me go. I ran to the garden to be with Aunt Pauline. Once again, the adult who should have protected me didn’t even notice I was trembling in fear.

  Even my own mother and father never seemed to suspect I was emotionally terrorized every time I was in Uncle Charlie’s presence. I recently found a photograph of me as a small child that brought back a fierce and chilling memory. I had been instructed by Grandmommy Judd to stand next to Uncle Charlie for the photo. He has his arm on my shoulder, pulling me into his waist. My face is scrunched up in disgust and my hands are clasped tightly in front of me, protectively across my lower half.

  I later came to suspect that he had abused his own granddaughter. She was my age, but we went to different schools. I never met her until we were teenagers. She approached me at a baseball game, when our schools were playing against each other, and said, “Hi, Naomi, I’m Susan, your cousin.”

  She was a beautiful girl with long, shiny black hair and high cheekbones. As pretty as she was, she had the same haunted and hunted look in her eyes that I often saw in my own. I felt, in my heart, that Susan and I shared the same dark and sickening secret. We never had any opportunity to talk, without other ears around, but I would think of her often in the following years. S
usan was shot and killed in her home in the 1970s. Her case remains unsolved.

  In the 1950s and ’60s, the majority of parents never thought about teaching their children how to protect themselves. No one discussed sexual abuse with kids. We now know the greatest danger to young girls is from an adult they know, not a stranger. I often thought that my mother might have suffered sexual abuse as a girl. If she did, she would never say. Any experience that fell outside the realm of the “all-American family” was “dirty laundry” that should never see the light of day.

  The common link among most of the traumatic events I wrote down on the Trauma Egg during this therapy was my relationship with my mother. Each painful memory shared a similar theme: being exposed to a threatening or troubling situation and then having my feelings go unrecognized or be dismissed by Mother.

  The more I recalled from my early childhood, the more conscious I became of what formed my strongest and earliest lifelong belief: that I couldn’t trust her.

  Another experience I wrote on the Trauma Egg was a full-fledged memory of coming close to being drowned at a city pool when I was six years old. The pool was a place for Mother to relax and have a lifeguard babysitter watch over my siblings and me.

  I had been paddling around near the steps leading in and out of the water, minding my own business, when an older and much larger girl decided that it was my day to die. She grabbed my shoulders and plunged me under the water. When my head was near the bottom step, she turned around and sat down on it, grinding my face into the concrete stair. I was helpless. No one could see my arms and legs flailing about underwater. I knew the lifeguard wasn’t watching the shallow end of the pool, where it wasn’t over anyone’s head. I felt the chlorinated water fill my nose, then pour into my throat. My vision began to go black and then I saw a bright white tunnel. My ears were throbbing with the pressure. I was drowning. I was going to die.

  Once again, I used the only weapon I had, my fingernails. I dragged the tips of my fingers across the skin of her shins and then pinched her as hard as I could. Angry, the large girl stood up and I floated to the surface. I gasped for air as water poured from my nose and projected from my throat. I crawled up the steps and, on my hands and knees, lay down on the warm concrete until I could stand up. When I went to find Mother, sunning herself on her beach towel, I tried to explain to her what had happened. I wanted her to wrap me in the towel and comfort me. I wanted her to examine the scratches on my face and then be outraged enough to report the bigger girl. She only looked up at me long enough to scold, “Don’t be dramatic.”

  Once again, she had failed to see I was in fear for my life. No sympathy or consolation would be coming from my mother. I wrapped myself in a towel and went to sit next to the lifeguard stand. I knew the bigger girl wouldn’t risk picking on me within earshot of his authority. I sat there, a sad observer of other kids calling out to their mothers, “Mom, watch this!” as they did handstands underwater or cannonballs from the diving board. Their mothers watched. Their mothers smiled at them. I could only fantasize about what that would be like.

  As my childhood progressed, one experience followed another that cemented the thought in my young mind that I was no more than an unimportant inconvenience to Mother. After taking a few years of piano lessons, which my daddy paid for, I played well enough to participate in the annual recital. I put on my favorite Sunday school dress and fixed my hair as best I could. I was certain that Mother would be pleased with my progress. I should have wondered if she would attend. She didn’t, even though where I took lessons was only one block from our house. I was heartbroken.

  On another occasion, the day of the grade school talent contest, I was brimming with enthusiastic energy about performing in the tap dance number I had learned in class. We waited for our music cue and then the curtain rose and the lights came up. My eyes scanned the faces in the audience, looking for Mother, as I tapped out the choreography the other kids and I had practiced many times. I guess I wandered too far near the edge of the stage in my attempt to locate my mother because when the curtain dropped at the end of the number, I was the only dancer left out in front of it. The audience broke into gentle laughter and I heard a few of the parents give me a sweet verbal encouragement as I turned up the charm, smiled, and waved, and “shuffled off to Buffalo” to the side of the stage where I could exit. After the show, some of the audience members gave me a hug and told me that it was their favorite moment of the talent show. I’m now convinced this was a turning point in my young life, that it set my destiny. I couldn’t get Mother’s personal attention, but I could get approval from an entire audience.

  I couldn’t believe Mother would miss something this important to me. My eight-year-old mind conjured a dramatic plot that she must have been kidnapped. I started to run home, imagining my mother being held hostage by some robbers, When I arrived home, Mother was where she could always be found, in the kitchen. I was crushed and confused. It wasn’t that my mother had forgotten; it wasn’t her priority. My mother didn’t need saving, but my tender emotions did.

  The junior high school I attended was more than a mile and a half from our house. During the winter months this became a problem. I didn’t have a pair of boots, only one pair of low-heeled pumps that I had to wear every day. I would slip and slide through several inches of snow, which would seep over the edges of my pumps, freezing my feet. Some days would get so bad that I would stop at a friend’s house along the way just to thaw my toes.

  One morning there was a thunder and lightning storm that was blowing the rain almost sideways. Our old blue station wagon was always in front of the house, so I begged Mother to drive me to school. She refused. She never offered to drive me, even in the worst weather. I often arrived at school soaking wet or icy cold and would stand in the girl’s bathroom trying to blot my wet hair with paper towels or warm my feet by the radiator.

  As I continued to process each experience that was traumatic for me as a young girl, I uncovered an incredible amount of suppressed rage I had for the way Mother treated me. I wasn’t aware that so much built-up anger lay under the surface of my psyche, but it now seemed to be erupting. One memory followed another. Each one contained the similar theme of being disregarded by my mother. My opinions, passions, personal taste, and emotions were all ignored with a shrug and her cliché answer of “That’s just the way it is.” I felt invisible and powerless.

  One day I came home to find that Mother had decided to redecorate my bedroom. She had never mentioned her plan to me or asked my opinion about what I would like. For a girl who adored all things feminine and did my best to add flair to anything I owned, my new bedroom was like a slap in the face. Mother had picked out solid brown for everything: rug, bedspread, hideous plastic curtains, and a fake-wood laminated dresser. It looked like a cheap, generic truckers’ motel room. Everything was practical without an ounce of style or personality. In contrast, my younger brothers’ bedroom had a floral rug and bright-colored bedspreads that matched. It didn’t make sense to me, but no one cared if I understood her reasoning. I had a good cry about it and then decided I just had to live with it.

  Mother seemed to go out of her way to invalidate any effort I made at self-expression. When I was allowed to attend my first school dance, I spent hours getting ready. I was enjoying my popularity among my peers and I had looked forward to this social event for weeks. It was the sixties and a flipped-up bouffant, teased to a towering height, was all the rage. Of course, it wasn’t a practical everyday style, but I wanted to make a good impression at my first dance. I layered and teased my hair to what I thought was perfection. I went into the kitchen to say goodbye to Mother as the boy I was going to the dance with arrived at the front door. Mother was canning pickles and turned from the counter to look at me. Silently, she picked up a mason jar full of sticky pickle juice and dumped it unceremoniously over my head. It was her way of disapproving of my grown-up style. I guess she thought words couldn’t express her feelings. I sent Jimmy
Keeton on his way and went upstairs to wash my hair. My first school dance would have to wait.

  As an adult, looking back more than fifty years, each of these interactions with Mother felt like a purposeful attack on my growing sense of self. It was as if my mother was unconsciously, or perhaps very consciously, making certain that I knew that she was a depressed person and she was determined that I would be one, too. Recently, my youngest brother remarked to me: “I never understood why Mother treated you so differently than the rest of us.”

  It was the first time I had validation for my personal truth.

  * * *

  The competent therapists and staff at Psychological Counseling Services spent the first week helping me process the tumultuous emotions I had suppressed in my childhood. I was still having panic attacks almost every night. Vanderbilt may have detoxed my body from an overload of antidepressants and antipsychotics, but they left behind the depression and anxiety.

  I finally learned about what was causing my panic attacks. My central nervous system had gone on overdrive from repressing bad memories for so many years. For me, the worst memories were of my childhood, feeling unheard and unloved.