Ashley Judd penned an emotional personal essay in honor of late mom Naomi ahead of Mother’s Day, falling just days after the country star’s death by suicide, reminding the world that unlike the Grammy winner’s journey, motherhood should not be forced but chosen.
“This Sunday is abruptly, shockingly, my first Mother’s Day without my mama,” the Emmy-nominated actress and activist, 54, wrote in an op-ed for USA Today. “She died just days before my sister [country singer Wynonna] 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,” continued the “Divergent” actress. “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.”
Judd went on to allude to the threat of Roe v. Wade being overturned, noting her heart is also “filled with … incandescent rage.
“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,” she continued. “She showed my sister and me the power of having a voice and using it, and there has been no greater lesson. 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.”
Judd said she’s now pondering “whether we value” mothers in society, given the high maternal death rate in the U.S. and because, “So often, motherhood happens because of violence, because of neglect, because schools and health systems fail to provide reproductive health information.”
Judd added that she “never took my bodily autonomy for granted, aware this right is denied to hundreds of millions of girls and women. … We see it in the most disadvantaged places. And we see it in our own country.”
Judd issued a reminder for those who feel that believing “motherhood should always be a choice” sounds “radical,” noting that while her “mama was a legend,” she didn’t get there by chance.
“She had to fight like hell to overcome the hand she was dealt, to earn her place in history. She shouldn’t have had to fight that hard to share her gifts with the world,” she said.
The “Someone Like You” star urged people to spend this Mother’s Day honoring their moms “for more than her labor and sacrifice … by demanding a world where motherhood, everywhere, is safe, healthy — and chosen.”
Judd and big sister Wynonna accepted The Judds’ — comprised of Wynonna and Naomi — induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame last Sunday, a day after her daughters confirmed she had died “of the disease of mental illness.”
