All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [106]
Colleen let me do my wash in her apartment. She also roasted me a chicken almost every weekend. She took me to Baskin-Robbins for ice cream from time to time, and she gave me the Big Book of AA to read. She said she suspected there was addiction in my family. Addiction was a word I had never heard, and the idea my family might have it was a wholly original observation. I remember feeling a spark of elation, the sense that maybe there was a name for what plagued my family so severely and caused so much dysfunction, and that if it had a name, and someone like Colleen could talk about it so readily and had in fact herself somehow moved past it, then maybe, God willing, there might be hope for a different kind of life for us. When I asked her why she didn’t do something about my dad if she knew what was wrong, she told me there was nothing anyone could do until he hit bottom and asked for help. She taught me that one can carry the message of recovery, but one cannot carry the person. As helpful as this relationship was, I still find it incredibly odd that no one else noticed or intervened on my behalf—to say the least.
Colleen’s friendship made a profoundly lonely and ignominy-filled year endurable. But it was not enough to keep me safe. Although he never used in front of me, it was obvious that my dad’s disease worsened with each passing month. He has since been candid with me about the extent of his addiction while he was home and how obsessed he was with me going to sleep so he could get down to business. While away, he would call me in the middle of the night and rage incoherently; when he was in town, he was by turns paranoid and angry. His thinking grew increasingly distorted, and he began telling me it was in my power to remedy some of our family’s interpersonal ills. He would demand I do something about Mom, complaining about the way she treated him, how she prevented him from seeing Sister, and the Judds, on the road. He was in this mode when he decided that I needed to know the “big family secret.” In the living room of the apartment, he told me that he was not my sister’s biological father. I’d had no idea until that moment.
I took this information stoically. Although it was shocking, it also made sense. I already felt our family was a screwed-up, crazy, irredeemable mess, a family full of hatred, fighting, accusations, manipulation, abandonment, and emotional and physical violence. Disapproval, contempt, manipulation, and demonizing others—this was the major currency of each relationship. This information fit perfectly into the helpless, hopeless container of my broken heart. It made such screwed-up sense that Dad knew this thing that Mom hated him for knowing, this thing that she manically feared he would use against her. I realized it was as if he had a loaded, cocked gun and he just … walked around with it all the time, and she was desperately, creatively scrounging for ways to restrain, control, or trump him. And both of them used us kids in their power struggle. The lie took on ever-greater meaning, proportion, and without being spoken about out loud, it actually dominated our lives mercilessly.
It didn’t occur to me to tell my sister. I had no voice and no power in this family, so why would it? Instead, along with the many other secrets I was well practiced in keeping, this became one more that weighed me down with a crushing sadness that was nearly killing me.
And if that weren’t