All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [100]
While Pop was away, Mother would steam open his mail and secretly follow his tour bus out of town, sometimes catching him with other women. She’d throw him out and then send my sister to talk him into coming back, or she’d compose lengthy letters for Sister to read to him on the phone, while she sat silently by and semaphored, coaching Sister’s performance. Their fights were epic. Sometimes Mom would go for her revolver, and several times Sister called the cops to break it up. I heard and watched all of this, every bit of it, and I never understood why the police didn’t take me with them when they left. How I remember standing barefoot on the back porch in my nightgown, watching the officers’ backs as they returned to their squad car, and the quiet of their leaving.
One of my behaviors during this period was to plan my time at home in meticulous detail. While the school day was winding down, I would write out the flow of my afternoon and evening in quarter-hour segments, deciding in advance how to spend each successive fifteen minutes, desperate to fill the long, empty hours or keep myself busy and out of the way while the dysfunction played out. Once, when I just couldn’t stand it anymore, I ran over a mile to our closest neighbor’s house, people I had never met, intending to shout at them, “Help me! There are crazy people living in my house!” I rang the bell, chest heaving, out of breath, and their giant, terrifying dog bounded out, snapping its jaws at me, eye-level. It was the most frightened I have ever been in my life. My knees buckled and I nearly fainted on the spot. By the time someone answered the door, I was completely broken; the wind was out of my sails. The neighbor drove me home without me saying a word.
It was about this time that I took to playing with Mom’s gun, trying to decide if it would be worth it to shoot myself. I don’t remember the first time I did it, but soon there were many days after school when I was sitting cross-legged on the floor on my mother’s side of the bed, facing a long, narrow window that looked out into the side yard. I would expertly check the chamber, load bullets, give it a spin, and with a jerk of my wrist click the chamber into place, cock the trigger, and then hold the gun to my right temple. To me, the way my family lived was already killing me. This sort of death often seemed preferable, the only escape I had available to me. I tried to tell people what it was like to be me, what being here felt like. My reality was that no one listened, no believed me, and even if they did pity me, no one acted. Episodes of suicidal ideation to cope with searing emotional pain continued into my adulthood, and to this day I have no clue how I survived, other than by the grace of God, especially in the form of angels intermittently put in my path who showed some interest in me. They kept me going.
I returned to the dream that maybe Papaw Judd and Cynthia would try to rescue me, if they only knew what living on Del Rio was like. So I wrote a long letter casually describing the details of my everyday life, the craziness of the relationship with Pop, the days and days I spent alone, the way I never had a ride to or from school or my activities, thinking they would take the hint. But the letter never reached them. I found it on my mother’s dresser. I looked askance at my mother, who had obviously opened and read it. “Don’t you ever talk bad about me to my daddy again,” she said. From then on, I kept my various plans of escape to myself.
The irony is that if you’d met me at the time, you would have thought I was an all-American kid, and in some ways I was. I was a cheerleader my freshman year in high school, was voted vice president of the student body as a sophomore, went to the prom with a well-liked football player, and had lots of friends. In a way I was living a double life, keeping my loneliness and my deepening depression to myself. If I mentioned it to anyone at home, I would be given a speech as to how difficult Mom’s life was, in which she would