I wondered: Who, exactly, was having all the fun? What was I missing?Īs I write these words, I am happy to say that each of us has embarked on a personal process of healing, and my family is healthier than it has ever been. She and my sister have been quoted as saying that our family put the “fun” in dysfunction. My mother, while she was transforming herself into the country legend Naomi Judd, created an origin myth for the Judds that did not match my reality. There was too much trauma, abandonment, addiction and shame. My family of origin, the one into which I was born, was also brimming with love but was not a healthy family system. My family of choice is a colorful assortment of surrogate grandparents, aunts, uncles, and friends who infuse me with love, belonging, and acceptance. It as then that I discovered we all belong to two families: our family of choice and our family of origin. 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. 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. 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. It was a typical story of the time: high school girl becomes pregnant and “has” to marry her teen-age boyfriend. 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. My dad sold electronic components for the aerospace industry my mom stayed home and seethed with boredom. 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 parents, Michael and Diana Ciminella, were small-town kids from rural eastern Kentucky. 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. 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. 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. 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. My 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. Before seeing this snapshot, I had not known they had shared lighthearted moments.
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