Naomi and Ashley Judd.Photo: Beth Gwinn/Getty Images
Ashley Juddis speaking up about an important topic ahead of her firstMother’s Daywithout late momNaomi Judd.
The Golden Globe nominee, 54, paid tribute to the country icon — whodiedlast weekend — in an essay forUSA Today, which also questioned the value of mothers following the leaked draft opinion of the Supreme Court’s intention tooverturnRoe v. Wade.
“This Sunday is abruptly, shockingly, my first Mother’s Day without my mama,” she started. “She died just hours before her peers at the Country Music Hall of Fame could demonstrate to her how much they esteem her. She died just days before my sister and I could show her again how much we love and honor her.
“It wasn’t supposed to be this way. I was supposed to visit her on Sunday, to give her a box of old-fashioned candy, our family tradition. We were supposed to have sweet delight in each others' easy presence. Instead, I am unmoored. But my heart is not empty. It is replete with gratitude for what she left behind. Her nurture and tenderness, her music and memory,” Ashley added.
She went on to write that her heart is also filled with “incandescent rage” over the mental health issues Naomi faced and “the wounds she carried from a lifetime of injustices that started when she was a girl. Because she was a girl.”
Naomi, Ashley and Wynonna Judd in 1999.Robin Platzer/Twin Images/Getty
“My mama was an extraordinary parent under duress: She showed my sister and me the power of having a voice and using it, and there has been no greater lesson,” Ashley wrote. “But motherhood happened to her without her consent. She experienced an unintended pregnancy at age 17, and that led her down a road familiar to so many adolescent mothers, including poverty and gender-based violence.
“Forgive me if my grief isn’t tidy. When I think about my mother, I am awash in the painful specifics. It’s a little easier, this Mother’s Day, to think about mothers in the collective, to wonder whether we value them,” she continued.
Ashley cited statistics from theWorld Health Organizationthat approximately 800 women died each day in 2017 from complications with pregnancy and childbirth, noting her firsthand account of seeing women “whose bodies were mangled from childbirth” while she volunteered with the United Nations Population Fund in South Sudan.
TheDivergentactress also pointed out that the United States has one of the highest maternal death rates in the developed world, according to theCenters for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as aNational Library of Medicinestudy that found some of the top causes of death among pregnant women in the U.S. were homicide, suicide and overdose.
Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/For The Washington Post via Getty
Her essay comes afterPoliticoreleased a leaked draft opinionof the Supreme Court’s intention to overturn the historicRoe v. Wadecase, which established the right to abortion. Amidnationwide protests, PresidentJoe Bidenhas sincecalled on Congressto codify the right to an abortion and “protect a women’s right to choose.”
“My mama was a legend. She was an artist and a storyteller, but she had to fight like hell to overcome the hand she was dealt, to earn her place in history,” she wrote. “She shouldn’t have had to fight that hard to share her gifts with the world.
Ashley and sisterWynonna Juddannounced the death of their motherNaomi last weekend in a joint statement. Shediedafter a years-long battle with mental illness.
The sisterspaid tribute to Wynonnathe next day at The Judds' induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame.
source: people.com
