All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [12]
During all this drama, Dad tried moving back in for a while, but the marriage was irreparably shattered. Their divorce was finalized in 1974. Dad decided to move to Chicago for a better job at the home office. He arranged to travel on business to Los Angeles as often as he could, and would spend long weekends with us at the house while Mom stayed elsewhere. Like many bitter ex-spouses, she never missed the chance to run him down in front of us. She began a campaign of character assassination, telling us she never really loved Dad, trying to make him seem pathetic and weak for loving her when it was not reciprocated. He says he was trying to support us, but she told us he’d abandoned the family with no money. Mom denigrated him incessantly, trying to make him sound dangerous and untrustworthy. “He’s a liar, he’s a cheater, he’s no good,” she’d say. “He never loved you girls.” Mom always told me that dad didn’t want me, that he even had pressured her to have an abortion. She also called me a “foam baby,” indicating her birth control had failed her.
In the sadness and confusion that followed their final break up, I withdrew into myself, my imagination, and my friendship with Gabrielle, with whom I played games in which we imagined being rescued (her parents were divorced, too, and her mom was an active alcoholic). Christina expressed her anxieties in other ways. It was clear at an early age that Sister (that’s what we call each other in the South) had a special musical gift. She could hear a tune on a television cartoon, then immediately go over to the piano and pick out the melody, or imitate Woody Woodpecker uncannily, making us laugh. I also remember that when she was still very young, grown-ups starting treating her as if there were something wrong with her. She began wetting the bed when she was eight, when Mom and Dad split up. She also walked in her sleep—once, a friend identified her in her footie pajamas walking on Sunset Strip in the middle of the night—and suffered frightening asthma attacks. She was also strong-willed, truculent, and acting out with rage. They started talking about her in hushed tones, labeling her as a “troubled kid.” I’m sure they meant well, but that label incensed me because I could see her as the little girl she actually was. Those adult voices seemed, to my child’s mind, so condescending and patronizing, and their attitude certainly didn’t seem to help her any. I think it was my first personal exposure to real unfairness, and I suspect that it’s where I began to develop an extreme sensitivity to any kind of injustice and rage at my impotence to protect a vulnerable child who couldn’t protect herself.
Even though she sometimes teased me mercilessly or tickled me until I wet my pants, I loved my big sister madly. She was my protector. I remember jumping into bed with her while our house on Larrabee Street rattled during a big earthquake. When I was still too little to be in school all day, I would play in my sister’s room to feel closer to her. I was so eager to learn to read and write and count, and I would sit at her tiny table pretending to study, doing what I imagined she was doing in big-girl school. I remember trying to write, making little peaks and valleys in a straight line, and calling Mom in. “Yes, they do look like m’s and n’s,” she said, and when she left, I floated through the rest of my self-administered studies, so proud that I was fit to be tied.
I so wanted to fit in with the grown-ups that it was frustrating when I couldn’t keep up. I hated to be left out of a conversation. I remember sitting at the supper table when I was about four, listening to the adults discuss the spiritual nature of God. With inspired timing, I picked up my sparerib and declared, “God is a sparerib!” Spirit, sparerib—it all sounded the same. My mother and her friends started laughing—for them it was one of those cute Kids Say the Darndest Things moments. But I took it badly. I felt ridiculed and humiliated. It felt as if every time I mixed up