All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [16]
During this time Mom was busy with school and a boyfriend, and I have long successive memories of nothing but time, endless time, spent on my own. A pattern of isolating myself, having secret, unacknowledged feelings of deep pain and anger, and especially stultifying loneliness, began in earnest. I guess it was a reaction to being alone so much, and perhaps as an adaptation, a response to relationships in which my needs were not being met. Sometimes I would lie in bed for long stretches of time, staring at the knotty pine wall in my bedroom, or color the same images incessantly (a log cabin under a rainbow—no humans; or a lone old man). I realize now that this was my first bout of childhood depression. My distracted mother and sister saw only what they needed to see: an intelligent, charming child who was eager to please. Nobody saw a depressed seven-year-old who needed attention and possibly treatment. Thus my journey with the disease of depression began and progressed as I grew older and many times nearly killed me. Just the first hint of what was to come.
Chanticleer’s lonely legacy did include one enduring gift, what is perhaps my best memory of my mother. My relatives tell me I always had an entourage of imaginary friends I had invented to keep me company, and that I believed in them wholeheartedly. I spoke to my unseen friends with unself-consciousness, even in public places. At Chanticleer, I went further, and began to create a whole community of fairies and set about immersing myself utterly in their world. I spent days and days crafting tiny, elaborate houses for them out of grass, leaves, moss, and acorns among the roots of giant trees and along the rocky-edged creeks deep in the woods that surrounded us.
Mom was always busy with school. When she was home, she would be squirreled away in her room studying, and I suppose I missed her terribly. But when I had her attention, she could be wonderful, and she was clearly charmed by my heartfelt devotion to my fairies. At dusk one autumn afternoon, we were getting out of her red Volkswagen Beetle and I noticed a piece of paper blowing across the yard.
“Go get that, Ashley,” said Mom.
“Why do I have to pick it up? I didn’t leave it there!”
“Just go get it.”
Finally I gave in and fetched the piece of paper. When I looked at it closely, my jaw dropped—it was a letter addressed to me from the fairies! Mom had made up a language for them, along with a hieroglyphic alphabet, which I had to translate. In my room alone, I read how they told me how hard it was to write, because the pen was so big and they had to stand on one another’s shoulders to hold it upright. I was enthralled. All I wanted to do for the rest of the school year was commune with the fairies. They helped me through some very rough and lonely days. I have no memories of friends from school, except playing one cold winter afternoon on an empty playground with a girl I didn’t know, discovering she was still there, too, because her parents were divorced and there was no one to pick her up on time. Fairies helped distract me from such painful disappointments and feelings of insecurity.
When Mom was home from school, she would sometimes give me a dime or quarter to rub her feet while she worked on her nursing studies. I am sure we did some other things together, but those aren’t the memories that stuck. I learned to cook my own breakfast, and that expanded into another dimension of my autonomy in the household. I guess she needed me to be able to look after myself to a large