All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [5]
Since I began this work in 2003 as the global ambassador for Population Services International, a public health nonprofit, and the partner organizations I have enthusiastically joined along the way, I have been on the front lines of the battle against preventable diseases like malaria and HIV/AIDS; traveled into the depraved world of human trafficking, sex slavery and labor slavery; visited the palaces and corridors of power, engaging the decision makers who can improve public policies.
My aim, when I began this journey, was to make my life an act of worship, to be useful to my fellows. To do this, I would witness firsthand the stories of the poorest of the poor and carry their narratives like treasure home to the richest country in the world, America. I hoped it might be possible that I could help change, and perhaps even save, lives.
What I did not expect was that one life I would change and save would be my own.
Chapter 1
FAMILY OF CHANCE, FAMILY OF CHOICE
Mamaw and my mother. Before seeing this snapshot, I had not known they had shared lighthearted moments.
Say not, “I have found the truth,” but rather, “I have found a truth.”
—KAHLIL GIBRAN
y favorite author, Edith Wharton, wrote in her autobiography, “My last page is always latent in my first, but the intervening windings of the way become clear only as I write.” So it has been with me as I have undertaken to make sense of my own past.
Although the home of my heart is in the Appalachian Mountains, I always considered it auspicious that I was born in Southern California, one of the most transitory places in the world, during one of the most turbulent springs in American history. When I arrived by cesarean section at Granada Hills Hospital on April 19, 1968, California was the epicenter of a society in the throes of a cultural and spiritual upheaval. The Vietnam War was raging. The nation was still reeling from the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and Bobby Kennedy would soon be gunned down at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, leaving a generation of idealists lost in a tide of grief and regret. Some of the flower children who had flocked to San Francisco for the Summer of Love were now panhandling for loose change along Hollywood’s Sunset Strip—a place I would soon know well.
My parents, Michael and Diana Ciminella, were small-town kids from rural eastern Kentucky. Like most everyone else in the Los Angeles basin, they had moved to California looking for a fresh start in what Joan Didion described as “the golden land where every day the world is born anew.” In 1967, my parents bought a tract house on a cul-de-sac in Sylmar, a suburb carved out of olive groves in the San Fernando Valley, about twenty miles north and a world away from Hollywood. My dad sold electronic components for the aerospace industry; my mom stayed home and seethed with boredom. They had dreams, just different ones. And they had secrets.
They had married too young and for the “wrong” reason—namely, the unplanned pregnancy that produced my older sister, Christina (you know her as Wynonna), when Mom was only seventeen. It was a typical story of the time: high school girl becomes pregnant and “has” to marry her teenage boyfriend. But there was a twist: Michael wasn’t the father of Diana’s baby—something he didn’t know at the time of the wedding, and something my sister and I wouldn’t learn for decades. When I came into the world four years later, my family’s troubled and remarkable course had already been set in motion, powerfully shaped by my mother’s desperate teenage lie and the incredible energy she dedicated to protecting it.
I began to understand the dynamics of my past, and how we are only as sick as our secrets, when I was thirty-seven years old and started on a simple and practical path of personal recovery. It was then that I discovered we all belong to two families: our family of choice and our family of origin. My family of choice is a colorful assortment of surrogate