In July 2012, I thought I had hit an all-time low emotionally. I had concluded that I was of little value to anyone and had the lowest feelings of self-worth I had ever had my life.
Then, while changing into clean pajamas one evening, I found a large lump in my breast. It seemed like a sequel to a bad dream, one in which you wake up in fear, try to shake it off, and then fall right back to sleep and continue the same nightmare.
Larry set me up for a doctor appointment at Vanderbilt Breast Center. When the doctor told me that the mass seemed very worrisome and suggested an MRI, I wanted to leave immediately. The idea of being enclosed in a large metal tube for forty minutes was more than I could possibly bear. My anxiety started a steep ascent and I had a hard time catching my breath. Larry convinced me to go through with the test, pleading with me not to risk my physical health. Relying on Klonopin to keep me calm, I somehow made it through the test, with Larry speaking gently to me the entire time, reading scriptures from the Bible. The results of the MRI were inconclusive and so I was scheduled for a biopsy.
My nerves now felt like they had come through my skin and were exposed to the elements. No one, except Larry and Ashley, knew what I was going through. I didn’t even call my group of “Ya-Ya” girlfriends.
I was admitted to the hospital, where under anesthesia I had a cluster of cells removed from my breast. In a couple of days, the doctor called with the good news that the results had come back negative but that I would have to keep an eye on the lump. Larry hugged me, smiling in relief. I was happy for him, but I could not feel much relief for myself.
Being away from Wynonna and having Ashley travel so often for her acting career or humanitarian work left me feeling desperately lonely for family. I still had great friends I could call, but during these days of extreme vulnerability, I longed for family. I craved a guaranteed stability, since I felt like I had none in my diseased brain. I wanted to bring my loved ones close and build a fortress around us all. I was deeply fearful that we would all drift apart. With my emotions feeling so out of control, I wanted to feel protected and surrounded by those who knew me best. I became even more terrified of being alone. I had to know where Larry was at all times. I didn’t want him to leave my side.
If someone had told me that the fiercely independent Naomi Judd would become a nerve-racked, clingy wife, I would have laughed. Depression and anxiety had drastically changed my perspective on feeling safe and secure. I felt a pervading sense of danger or threat, like something worse might descend on me, even though I couldn’t label it exactly. It was a heightened fear of the unknown future. Was the severity of my mental health a passing phase or would it forever be present, dooming my life to a misery I could never shake?
My fears of being alone brought up a long-buried sorrow, a heartbreaking memory of a time when another unknown factor first threatened, and then forever changed the stability of my family home.
On a warm Saturday morning when I was eighteen, I took my baby daughter over to my parents’ house for a drop-in visit. My day-to-day life had changed drastically in the previous six months and I found myself yearning to be back with my parents and the familiarity of the house I grew up in, and away from the overbearing and constant critical attention of my perfectionist, controlling mother-in-law. Being at my childhood home made me terribly homesick.
As a daddy’s girl, I was sad that we had grown distant with each other ever since the day he heard that I was pregnant. I thought it was all because of his disappointment in me, but that wasn’t the only reason for his detached attitude. About thirty minutes after my arrival, he grabbed the keys to his truck and a small duffel bag. I chased after him to the front porch.
“Where are you going, Daddy?”
“Fishing,” he said off-handedly, without looking back at me.
I knew he was fibbing because the bed of his pickup truck was completely empty. “Is your fishing stuff in the cab of the truck?” I asked.
He knew I was on to him. “I have to get my gear.”
“Well, yeah!” I blurted out with a faltering conviction. “If you’re really going fishing.”
His shoulders drooped and he glanced at me dejectedly. “I’ll be back home Sunday night, in plenty of time for work at the gas station on Monday.”
I was trying really hard not to cry. I was terrified that he would never come back to us.
Mother joined me on the porch as Daddy drove off. “He’s going to see her.” She went back inside, to the kitchen, where she could always be found, for more than twenty years of their marriage, cooking, washing and ironing clothes, doing everything to take care of Daddy and four children. My heart began to break. Sure, I had heard the rumors around town, but now my own mother was confirming that they were true.
A young woman who worked as a receptionist for Ashland Oil had begun dropping by Daddy’s gas station on a regular basis. Her name was Cynthia, a semi-attractive girl who was only a couple of years older than me. In Ashland, Kentucky, in the 1960s, she was labeled “from the wrong side of the tracks.” But she was smart enough to figure out a way to change sides quickly. She began flirting with Daddy whenever she could. For a few years, it appeared to be only a flirtation, but then everything took a turn in her favor. Daddy started spending overnights with her.
I wanted to dash into the kitchen and hold Mother, realizing that she had to be devastated. By the time I saw her, she was scrubbing the grease spots out of Daddy’s work pants and acting like absolutely nothing was wrong.
Even if Mother could pretend everything was status quo, I couldn’t. I had noticed that after Brian had died, my parents drifted apart. I was emotionally distraught that my father would cheat, but mostly I was appalled beyond measure that he would have an affair with this opportunistic young woman who could have been one of my schoolmates.
While I was living in Los Angeles, Daddy finally did leave home, never to return. He moved in with the demanding Cynthia and filed for a divorce. Soon after, he married her. I have no idea if he was in love; I suspect it was lust. True to our family pattern, we never spoke about his emotions or ours. However, I refused to accept her as a family member, this woman who appeared out of nowhere and had more influence over my father than my siblings and me or my mother.
Mother behaved like a vengeful fury once the reality of the situation sank in. For a number of years, she would not communicate with me at all. I didn’t know why she shut down so completely against me, and she never explained. I believe it’s because I didn’t take sides and I wouldn’t testify against Daddy at the divorce hearing. Because of her refusal to have anything to do with me, when I would visit Ashland, I would drive by our house and sit outside, watching her pace in front of the windows. I would bring a gift for her birthday or Christmas and leave it by her front door, run back to my car, and speed off. It broke my heart, knowing Mother was there alone.
Soon after Daddy died of kidney failure in 1984, I was tipped off by my cousin Chuck, whom Daddy thought of as another son, that Cynthia was attempting to keep the money and certificates of deposit Daddy had designated to go to my brother, sister, Chuck, and me. Now I knew for certain the exact type of greedy stepmother Cynthia really was. I took action and rushed to the bank the next day and marched into the manager’s office with Chuck and my Daddy’s lawyer in tow.
I lowered my voice and said, “I think you know why I’m here. A representative from the FDIC is right behind me, so I suggest you hand over the CDs within the next five minutes.”
It worked. I didn’t have a car at that time, so I used that money to buy one that belonged to Conway Twitty. Wy and I had been performing as the opening act for Conway’s tour in 1984. He collected vintage automobiles of great style and offered to sell me his sublime turquoise ’53 Cadillac. My daddy loved Caddys, so I used $10,000 of the money he left me to buy this extravagant car and drove it proudly.
But, a showpiece classic car was a shallow replacement for what I longed for most, a close and loving family. Looking back, fighting for the ten thousand dollars Daddy had left to me seemed an easy feat compared to winning unconditional acceptance or, at least, approval from either of my parents. I thought about how ironic it was that I had won the accolades of millions of fans, music critics, and songwriters from around the world, but was never able to believe that my own parents were happy for my success. Each time I had any expectation that they would be proud of me, my hopes were dashed.
A stinging heat flooded from my neck up to my face, the exact way it did the day I called my father from a pay phone to tell him that Wy and I had secured our very first recording deal after moving to Nashville. I had been living by my wits for years, and then working multiple shifts as a nurse to give Wy and me time to perform. On that golden day, after finally getting a chance to sing for RCA executives, we were told to wait in O’Charley’s restaurant next to the studio while they deliberated whether we were talent they wanted to invest in.
I was ecstatic when the label men arrived with a handshake of congratulations and a promise of a recording contract. I grabbed a quarter, ran to the pay phone by the front door, and called my father. When he picked up the phone, I gushed out the fantastic news. I could hear Daddy exhale and I knew he was smoking one of his unfiltered Camel cigarettes.
“Isn’t it exciting, Daddy? Our hard work is finally paying off. We have an RCA recording contract.”
I could picture the exact setting my father was in more than three hundred miles away. He would be sitting in his red La-Z-Boy chair, with a TV tray by his side holding a Pepsi and a bowl of salted Planter’s peanuts. His two little Westie dogs, Bonnie and Clyde, would be on his lap as he watched Bonanza. I heard him take a long drag on his cigarette again. Then he responded to my enthusiasm, without a single congratulatory word.
“You’re not going to quit your nursing job, are you?”
“I don’t know, Daddy.” My elation turned to regret that I had called him. I wanted to slam the phone down.
After a couple of minutes of his telling me that it would be foolish to leave a stable job like nursing and that show business was not for “regular folk” like me, I could hear him set the dogs down on the floor and sit upright.
“Well, Cynthia has my dinner ready. Thanks for calling, honey.”
My memory still holds that sting of rejection from the most important man in my life, ever.
There was only one thing that seemed to impress my father, out of all of my accomplishments. While watching one of his “regular folks” shows, he got to see Wy and me sing our number one song, “Mama, He’s Crazy,” on Hee Haw. To him that was the most impressive thing a simple girl from Ashland, Kentucky, could possibly do.
My bruised heart soon recovered from that phone call. Somewhere inside I flipped a switch from building a career to please my divorced parents to only doing it for Wy, Ashley, and me. As much as I could, I stayed true to that conviction, although I continually faced disappointment from my parents’ inability to be happy for me, no matter what I did. I don’t know why I had ever expected it, since neither of my parents ever had a moment of curiosity about what I wanted to do in the future or encouraged my educational pursuits or helped me to explore my options at all.
When I started my senior year of high school, I watched as my friends applied to various colleges. I was jealous that their parents would drive them to see the campuses and for interviews. My parents never once broached the subject of higher education; the word college was never spoken in our home, so I assumed it was something that I shouldn’t even think about, though I dreamed of attending the University of Kentucky. They lived meal to meal, chore to chore, and season to season.
I had broken away, jumped off the treadmill of dreary and monotonous daily life in the small town of Ashland, Kentucky. I had created a world for myself full of rich textures, new experiences, travel, and exciting ventures. But now that life had screeched to a halt.
As 2012 dragged on, I languished in my darkening misery on the kitchen couch. None of the antidepressants the psychiatrist had given me had improved my depression in the least. They actually caused my anxiety levels to break through to an even higher level. The psychiatrist tried me on a fourth antidepressant.
I would enthusiastically pop the next antidepressant, hoping, Maybe this one will work. I’ll be free of this endless melancholy and get back my even disposition and optimistic outlook. After three weeks, which is about how long it takes for an antidepressant to have a full effect, I realized that the fourth was ineffectual, and if anything, I found facing a new day harder than ever.
My normally logical and commonsensical mind became impulsive and hair-trigger with thoughts that something had to happen or change “right now.” After a week of dark days, both in the weather and my mood, I demanded that Larry sell our home and farm and that we move to California. To pacify me, Larry pretended to be searching for homes for sale in Del Mar, California. After endless misery, both day and night, a semblance of balance returned to my brain and I was frightened by my irrationality.
One day Larry encouraged me to go to the grocery store and pick out ingredients for dinner. It was the one trip out of the house that I could still be convinced to do. It was a way to be around people, but I didn’t have to hold up a conversation or look nice. The bright lights and the colorful aisles gave my brain waves a temporary lift. As I stood in the produce aisle, I almost started to laugh. But it wasn’t a chuckle of relief; it was the macabre laugh of a doomed person who realizes that there will be no escape.
Is this it? Is this all there is? I asked myself. This is now the highlight of my week? My whole life has now been reduced to squeezing melons in the produce aisle?
Larry asked me to try out a new church with him, thinking that a spiritual community would be a great support for me. I didn’t want to go. I had not been to church in years, after attending every Sunday when we were in town.
We had always gone to the same Pentecostal church where Larry and I were married and Ashley was baptized. Wynonna had married her first husband there. I thought it would be the church I attended for the rest of my life, until one Sunday the pastor decided to warn the congregation about the sinfulness and degradation of homosexuality. He advised the congregation that our children needed to be protected from gay people. I was stunned. Many of the people I’ve worked with over the years have been gay, both men and women. Far from needing to “protect ourselves” from gay people, I’ve always found it to be quite the opposite. My gay coworkers and friends have always protected me, taken care of me professionally, and stood up for me over the years. A number of my fans are gay. They have been loyal and loving for three decades and seeing their faces in the audience at my concerts with Wynonna has always made me feel a deep gratitude. The offensive words of the pastor had barely traveled to the back of the sanctuary before I was on my feet to leave, never to set foot in my home church again.
I thought about all of the hardships I had overcome in my life: being sexually abused as a child, losing my brother to cancer, teenage pregnancy, betrayal and abandonment by the birth father, my divorce, single motherhood, poverty, being on welfare following my divorce, sleeping on a deloused mattress from Goodwill, having to escape Los Angeles because of an ex-con stalker who raped and beat me, then living in a fishing cabin with no heat while putting myself through nursing school and working two other jobs, and overcoming a life-threatening disease, hepatitis C. Through it all, I had prayed.
I was done praying. Why would a loving God let me sink so low now? Why would he let the disease in my brain become so unpredictable and my thoughts so dark? I felt that God was a phony and had abandoned me to this hideous mental illness, and I was mad as hell at him. My faith withered away. I went into spiritual exile.
I told Larry that I couldn’t go to any church with him. Larry would hold me in his arms, but he was running out of words to comfort me.
One gloomy November morning, sitting on the edge of the bed, I was thinking about being onstage and how much joy I felt at the end of each concert. I wanted everyone in the audience to leave feeling really good, too. Wy and I would sing the Judds’ most widely known hit, “Love Can Build a Bridge.” It’s a song I wrote for our millions of fans the year I became ill with hepatitis C. It won a Grammy for Best Country Song. During my acceptance speech at the awards show I joked, “I don’t deserve this, but I have hep C and I don’t deserve that, either.”
“Love Can Build a Bridge” is an anthem of strength and recovery. Some of the lyrics: “I would swim out to save you, in your sea of broken dreams. When all your hopes are sinkin’, let me show you what love means.”
Here I was drowning, but I couldn’t save myself. I didn’t know where the hopelessness came from, so I could only think of one way to get rid of it. Love can build a bridge, but in my despair I was considering other ways that a bridge could end my pain.