By Ashley Stahl
Catch this story and others from the recent Women’s VOICES Theater Project, “When We Dance Again,” on Sunday, June 28, at 6pm on KDNK and archived at www.voicesrfv.org
There was a little girl in a kindergarten classroom who knew exactly what she wanted.
Over in the corner by the door there was a little house. A play kitchen. A space where the rules of the real world hadn’t quite arrived yet. One afternoon she got into an argument with another little girl about who got to be the mommy. The teacher came over and settled it the way teachers do. “Boys can’t be mommies,” she said. “You can be the daddy. Or the dog.”
The little girl didn’t have the words for what happened next. She just knew that something true about her had been looked at directly and called wrong. So she did what children do when the world tells them they are impossible.
She put it away.
For a long time I didn’t think that story was about me. I thought it was just a memory. A strange little artifact from a Catholic school classroom in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. It took me 30 years and a pandemic and a kitchen table and everything falling apart to understand what I had buried in that corner by the door.
I wanted to be a parent. That was the thing that kept coming back when I sat with the wreckage of my life trying to figure out what I actually needed. And following that wanting — really following it, all the way down — led me somewhere I hadn’t expected. Because I didn’t just research surrogacy that night. I researched hormones. I ordered a kit to preserve what my body had and a prescription for what it needed. In the same sitting. Like my hands knew something my brain was still arguing about.
I had never seen a reflection of what my life could look like. I had spent so long building walls against the parts of me that felt most true just to survive that I couldn’t see past them to what I actually was. The jump wasn’t into something foreign. I know that now. It was into something true that I had just never been given permission to see.
So I jumped.
My friend Becky agreed to carry my daughter. I had to tell her in the same phone call that I was a woman, that I was just beginning to live like one, that the person she was agreeing to do this with had always been there but was only now learning to take up space. She said yes anyway.
The months that followed were an exercise in hoping carefully. Never all the way. It became real when I started recording myself reading so my daughter could hear my voice through Becky’s skin. It became real when I learned that a woman’s body, whatever shape it takes, can breastfeed — and I started pumping every day into bottles that at first gave me nothing, then droplets, then enough to fill a freezer for a child not yet in the world.
In the delivery room I floated above my own body and watched. And then my parents walked through the door and my dad, who had come in strong the way dads do, cracked. And watching my father cry pulled me back down into my body like a ton of bricks. This is real. This is true. This is your life.
While all of that was happening, while I was learning to feed my daughter and becoming myself and falling into the life I had always been meant to have, other people were in rooms of their own, working very hard on a definition. A woman, they decided, is a person whose reproductive system is organized around the production of ovum. Clean. Clinical. They think they have finally solved the problem of me.
They have been trying to solve the problem of women for a very long time. Too loud. Too quiet. Too ambitious. Too soft. Not the right body. Not the right choices. Every woman reading this has been measured against a definition someone else wrote and found lacking in some way. They have been doing this to all of us. They just tried to write mine into law.
And after every form and every waiting room and every judge and every insurance appeal and every person who decided I wasn’t worth believing, you know what actually made me a woman?
Someone who loved me looked at a photograph. A photograph of a child I had spent years learning to hate, a child whose image felt like evidence of someone I wasn’t. And she said: “Oh yeah, that’s definitely a little girl.”
A woman is someone who has been loved into knowing herself.
And if I could go back to that classroom and kneel down next to that little girl and take her hands, I would tell her, “The social construct is bullshit. You don’t need anyone’s permission. Not the teacher’s, not the government’s, not anyone’s.
“You are going to become more of a mother than you could ever imagine. Not just to the children who come from your body and your heart and your friend’s extraordinary grace. Not just to the child you fought for in a courtroom and the child who came to you through love. But to children you choose. And to a community that desperately needs more moms.”
It was love. It was always love.
Ashley Stahl (she/her) is an activist, organizer and storyteller based in the Roaring Fork Valley. As executive director of PFLAG Roaring Fork Valley, she has dedicated her life to building queer communities in rural Colorado, and has become a fierce public voice for immigrants, trans people and anyone the system would rather ignore. She came to her womanhood the hard way, through fight, through love, through motherhood, and it is from that place that all of her work flows. A mother, a fighter, a woman on her own terms.