Mother’s Day: Ashley Judd honors Naomi Judd in heartfelt essay

Actress Ashley Judd honored her late mother, country music icon Naomi Judd, with an intimate, personal essay published in USA Today on Friday.

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The Golden Globe nominee, 54, touched on several issues during the op-ed honoring her mother, who died last week at the age of 76. That included wondering about the value of motherhood, and the issues Naomi Judd faced as a young mother and her struggles with mental illness as she got older.

“Forgive me if my grief isn’t tidy,” Ashley Judd wrote, adding that her mother was “an extraordinary parent under duress.”

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“This Sunday is abruptly, shockingly, my first Mother’s Day without my mama,” Ashley Judd wrote. “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.”

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Ashley Judd cited statistics from the World Health Organization that approximately 800 women died each day in 2017 from complications with pregnancy and childbirth, People reported. She added that she had firsthand experience of seeing women “whose bodies were mangled from childbirth” while she volunteered with the United Nations Population Fund in South Sudan.

Ashley Judd also referenced the leaked draft opinion of the Supreme Court’s possible intention to overturn Roe v. Wade and spoke about the landmark case as well, noting that “motherhood should always be a choice.”

The actress also addressed her mother’s mental health issues.

“Perhaps it’s indecorous to say, but my heart is filled with something else, too. Incandescent rage,” Ashley Judd wrote. “Because my mother was stolen from me by the disease of mental illness, by the wounds she carried from a lifetime of injustices that started when she was a girl. Because she was a girl.”

Naomi Judd was one-half of the singing duo, The Judds, performing with her daughter Wynonna Judd. Naomi Judd died on the eve of The Judds’ induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame on May 1. Wynonna Judd attended the ceremony, telling the audience that “I feel so blessed and it’s a very strange dynamic to be this broken and this blessed … but though my heart is broken, I will continue to sing.”

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Between 1984 and 1991, the Judds scored 20 Top Ten hits -- including 14 No. 1 singles, according to the Country Music Hall of Fame website. They also won five Grammy Awards, nine CMA awards and seven ACM awards.

“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,” Ashley Judd wrote. “She shouldn’t have had to fight that hard to share her gifts with the world.

“This Mother’s Day, I choose to honor my mama for the person she was, a mother and so much more. And I ask you to honor your own mother, if you are lucky enough to have her. Honor her for more than her labor and sacrifice. Honor her for her talents and dreams. Honor her by demanding a world where motherhood, everywhere, is safe, healthy -- and chosen.”

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