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Tag: Ashley

The Performance

Last winter, I chased a pair of evangelizing men off my porch. Not literally. Not broom in hand, flailing back and forth, but with firm words, I let them know their visits were no longer welcome. One of the men had graced my porch multiple times, always bringing some new face along to show them the way. Each time their silver sedan came to a careful stop on our driveway, I had opened my front door, chatted a while, and taken their pamphlets. This final time, though, I wanted to know how welcomed I would really be inside their house of worship. “I do have a question for you. Do women hold leadership positions in your church?” I had asked after the polite exchange of familiar greetings. “Oh yes! Of course!” came the quick reply. “That’s great. Like what?” “Oh, well, women are instrumental in teaching our children through Sunday school.” “And what about the larger congregation? Can women teach from the pulpit?” “Oh, well, no. The Bible is very clear about that,” he said with a smile. “You know the Bible says that men are to be the spiritual heads of the church and the household.”

Ashley

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The Wrong Kind of Children

The snow is falling, and the world has gone cold. A little boy sits in my living room watching Sesame Street and sucking his fingers while other little boys who look just like him sit inside detention centers all across this country. I sit by my phone, waiting for it to ring. I have been waiting since Tuesday, since she was born. Another baby in search of safety, another baby who will need so much more than her mother or this country is willing to provide. I wonder where she is and who is caring for her. I wonder if she is being fed or held. The little girl’s big brother toddles over to me and hands me a plastic microphone. I sing into it and hand it back. Smiling, he echoes my notes, then wanders away. I wonder for a moment if anyone is singing to that little girl or any of the other disregarded children stuck inside jail cells or piles of I’ll-get-to-it-later paperwork, but I already know the answer.

Ashley

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The Way a New Beginning Comes

As this year rushes toward its inevitable finish, plowing through poultry and evergreens and obligatory ball drops thick with crowds of strangers, I am determined to do the holidays differently. So far, however, I’ve done nearly everything we always do. The gifts have been purchased and are waiting in the basement. 2025’s remaining weekends have been filled with various gatherings alongside items I must remember to bring scribbled in the margins of my planner. And our Advent Calendar, a gray wooden house with 24 little drawers sits in the corner of our kitchen. It is a tradition that I have grown to hate, coordinating each night’s activity or small gift with our daily calendar, second guessing myself each step of the way. When the kids were small, the drawers were filled with the standard chocolates. One year, Rudolph figurines hid inside select boxes. Mini matchbox cars the next. But as the boys grew, those small surprises just didn’t bring the same smiles, and so my efforts grew, too. A couple years ago, they opened drawers which brought them midnight milkshakes and trips to the movies. Night hikes and hot cocoa bars came the following year. And last Christmas, I splurged and bought tickets to see the lights at Meijer Gardens, which is right about where my holiday spirit ran dry.

Ashley

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Don’t Let the Bastards Grind You Down

I’ve been thinking about The Handmaid’s Tale a lot lately. It took me years to watch the television adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s book, and to this day, I still haven’t been able to open her novel. Words on a page hold power that the screen can't capture, so I will likely leave those tucked away safely within their binding. Growing up as a girl in America formed scars that split open when confronted with the themes that run central to Atwood’s story, so for years, I just avoided it altogether. The timing of my entry into the author’s fictitious post-American Gilead could not have been better or worse as I made it to the final season while simultaneously watching our country shift into reverse. America had begun, once again, to prove itself the unwavering patriarchy we always knew it to be, but this time, things felt even heavier. This time, people weren’t hiding where they hoped this rerun would lead. They laid out their plans in 900 pages of policy recommendations to fast-track our multi-ethnic, multi-faith democracy toward a monolithic “Christian” state where God is used solely as a means of control. Not the best time to wrap up a dystopian drama where Christ calls women to serve as either walking wombs, domestic slaves, or docile, celibate wives.

Ashley

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How Loud Would You Scream?

Through our involvement with foster care, I have seen families dissolve right in front of me. Regardless of the reason, this undoing is unbearable. The wounds that follow sink deep, deep down inside the hollowed-out chest of those children left behind. These wounds refuse to be soothed—not with nighttime lullabies or daily reassurances, not with adoptive mothers or fathers wrapped tight around abandoned children, a human bandage to try and ease the hurt. Nothing can replace the bonds of blood, not love or time or the best-intentioned hope. These things, of course, can help, but I’m not sure they can ever fully heal what has been broken. This is the double-edged sword of foster and adoptive care. To build the ties of a new family, the first must be undone. Sometimes, this is the only choice that remains. Sometimes, the obstacles in the way of reunification are just too heavy for a family to lift, and the dissolution of that family is the heartbreaking last resort.

Ashley

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Brave Enough to Love, Brave Enough to Look

“Write about how what’s happening right now shouldn’t keep us from celebrating the Fourth of July and everything it’s meant to be,” my husband says as he glimpses the blank screen staring back at me. “But I don’t feel that way. I don’t feel that way at all,” I say. I would like to. I would actually love to. I would love nothing more than to cloak myself in red, white and blue this Friday and belt out the Star-Spangled Banner (undeniably off-key) as a chorus of fireworks stream down from the sky. I would love to join the crowds downtown and watch my boys snag Tootsie Rolls and Smarties from the street as waving neighbors walk the morning parade. I would love to look at those neighbors, covered in the colors of the flag, and not wonder who they voted for. I would love to go back to a day when that wasn’t the first thing I thought when I saw the Stars and Stripes waving from someone’s front yard or the back of their Silverado.

Ashley

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This Love Is Not Too Late

On a dreary Sunday in January, while our entire family was down with the flu, a baby boy arrived in our living room. It was not what I would have called perfect timing, but what did I know? We had always thought this expansion might come but assumed it would happen long ago…but no. A couple years past 40, my husband and I opened the door and our lives to an infant, the sibling of our adopted son, yet another beautifully made little boy who has already, in three short months, completely altered our world in the most powerful of ways. He has reminded us that even in periods gripped by fear and doubt, when we feel too overwhelmed or ill-equipped, when it would be easier to isolate than welcome, the call to love always arrives on time.

Ashley

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When the Crumbs Disappear

“The true measure of a society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members.” Mahatma Gandhi I am spending my day at a non-profit, one that serves children with physical, mental and emotional challenges. I sit tucked away in a back office that could use fresh ceiling tiles, a new door, and a coat of paint. The carpet, unraveling beneath my feet, needed replaced long ago. A decades old sound machine fires a hum from the threshold as an extension cord snakes along the hallway behind it. Passersby are alerted of the trip hazard by a bright orange traffic cone. This is the setting in which children who have undergone trauma are evaluated, at least those who find themselves pigeon-holed by state funds. This is the best we can do for our kids. Upon my arrival, I’d missed the driveway, ending up in the parking lot of my dermatologist instead. This medical mecca, freshly constructed with floor to ceiling windows, modern furniture and tasteful artwork, was the vision I thought I would be walking into this morning. But, to no one’s surprise, physical appearance is far more lucrative than mental health. Who wants to cover the cost of children’s emotional recovery when there are laugh lines and thin lips to be filled?

Ashley

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