Guest Post: Ashli Carnicelli is an author, https://exponentii.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/IMG_5173-scaled-1.jpg and classically trained singer. Ashli’s heartfelt narrative invites readers to embark on a soul-enriching experience through her works such as Cherish: The Joy of Our Mother in Heaven and her monthly newsletter sharing her testimony of Christ “The Pearls”. She recently was featured in LDS Living Magazine for her personal life experiences and reflections on God’s love. Ashli holds her Bachelor of Music Degree in Vocal Performance from The Boston Conservatory, and she and her husband Tony are the parents of four daughters.

Read part one to Ashli’s guest post here: Letting Him Prevail

It’s your turn to have “eyes to see” what I have
experienced a little bit more deeply,
and why I know for certain that my life’s path and decisions were guided by God. 

Before I spent every moment of my childhood from age 5 to my early 20’s preparing to be an Opera Singer, I was a ward of the state of Massachusetts. 

Just shy of my first birthday, my biological mother, who was about to turn twenty one years old, put me into the Foster Care system and placed me up for adoption. She tried to keep me for almost a year. My biological father was never in the picture, because he had no idea I even existed. (We found each other shortly after my baptism when I was 35- another story for another blog post!)  Without the support that she needed, she decided that the best thing for me was to place me in the care of social workers for the state of Massachusetts. 

For a few months I stayed with a foster family and with my social worker. My parents who adopted me were a young couple married at eighteen who experienced unexplained infertility. They had been married for 6 years and had just begun completing their dossier and taking classes with the state when my social worker pulled their file and invited them into her office. They were just 3 years older than my biological mom. 

“Sometimes you just need to throw away the paperwork and go with your gut. This baby was meant for you.” My social worker was my angel and my advocate. 

The day before Thanskgiving, two weeks shy of my first birthday, my parents brought me home. I lived with them for a full year, my biological mother’s rights to custody still available to her should she decide to re-petition for me. My parents had to file an ad in the newspaper alerting any family members that I was about to be adopted by them. No one came forward. A year after being placed in the foster care system, just before I turned two, I was legally adopted by my parents. 

I was raised as my parents’ only child. When I was 6 years old, they tried to adopt a sibling for me. A boy, also in the foster care system, who was one year younger than me. His biological mother was a drug addict and had AIDS due to her IV drug usage. He lived with us for a year, and when they filed the ad in the paper as they did for me, his biological Mother came forward petitioning for custody. The state would not allow us to adopt him. At age 7, I hugged my brother goodbye and watched as he yelled out the window of the car driving him away from me. He yelled out  his 6 year old assurance of “Don’t worry Ashli- you taught me a lotta love!”

That was the most traumatic thing I have ever been through and I’m still not over it. I remember the night before he left staring at his school picture on the entertainment center in our TV room. His sweet smile, his innocent face, his prospects of us becoming a family and for him to grow up with me completely obliterated. I remember thinking- what kind of a world am I living in?? This is life?? How is this fair? Living in a world where one child gets adopted and gets a loving home and another doesn’t? His biological mother died 5 years later and he was never adopted. He signed himself out of the system when he and I found each other on MySpace 17 years later. We remain close to this day- once I found him again I knew I would never let him go.  

When my birthmother gave me away, she sent letters and a few photos to be included in my file. My parents hung on to these letters and when I turned 18 they gave them to me. For starters, my parents had changed my legal name to Ashley Elizabeth. My birthmother had named me Ashtaroth Li (yes, THAT Ashtaroth if you were paying attention to Come Follow Me in the Old Testament last year) and she shortened it to AshLi. She provided my biological grandmother’s name, address and phone number and said “When AshLi turns 18 if she would like to find me, contact my mother because she will know where I will be living at that time.” My dad called my biological grandmother, who knew it was my 18th birthday and had been expecting the call. 

When I was reunited with my biological mother I ran through the whole gamut of emotions, through the lens of an 18 year old girl without a lot of life experience, humility or grace. I learned a lot of things that broke my heart. As much as I knew that my parents had prayed for me and had wanted me, there were some things about my story as well as some things said by some family members that made me feel very unwanted, even worthless- like I was an accident. Although I had been raised in the Catholic church until my parents left when I was 10 years old, I did not grow up with the doctrine that I was a beloved child of Heavenly Parents with a divine nature and destiny. My very existence made some in my biological family feel all sorts of feelings, some that they expressed without hesitation and this was not the welcome I had imagined or expected. I found out that she became pregnant with my sister a year after she gave me up, and kept her. She had my brother a few years after that and kept him too- all three of us have different fathers. To my young mind having been the only child given away was a gut punch, bursting my dream that my birth mom and I would be like Lorelai and Rory on “Gilmore Girls’- best friends, two peas in a pod, who exchanged pithy banter over tacos. Luckily, this is my sister and I have been very blessed in that regard. 

I learned that the cycle of unplanned pregnancy and fatherless children was becoming a family legacy-one I was determined to break. I vowed to myself that if I ever became a mother that I would be married and that I would plan and want my children and that I would do everything in my power to provide them stability and that they would know their father (barring the unforeseen like death or abandonment). 

At the peak of this personal tempest, after I made this promise to myself and as I moved away from home to start working on my music degree, I met my beloved husband. He was there for me and listened attentively as I worked through my emotions surrounding my family and my biological family. We were babies- he was 17 when we met- but it was love at first sight. There is no other way to describe that even though we didn’t become a couple until four years later (we both were dating other people when we met!) We knew that we were made for each other. 23 years later I can tell you that this is still true. 

A few years later as I started off my last essay, at the age of 22 I was working through my heartbreak of meeting my biological Mom with my sense of worth and identity compromised. I had come to this crossroads in my life-do I choose people over my dream? Marriage and family over my personal, solo ambitions? My music was what transcended all of my pain- no matter what was happening in my life, my art was a refuge for me. Despite feeling lost and having so many questions about my temporal self and my DNA, somehow my specific DNA enabled me to sing and use my body as the instrument. This connected me to my ancestors that I did not know- I did not know where a lot of them came from because my biological Mother was missing her biological Father and I was also missing mine. My singing was my entire identity at the time- it was what I held on to when everything else was obscure and confusing. 

By now you can probably imagine JUST how hard this decision was for me. At that time when I thought of family I thought of the words heart wrenching, complicated and risky. Could I really build my life around other people? But people can leave. I thought.  Do I have the courage and the strength to love and possibly lose? Wasn’t it safer to just go along with me, myself and I? I was always the constant in my own life (before I knew it was actually the Savior who was also!) 

The Savior knew just how much my heart needed to take the risk to love. To be vulnerable enough to allow myself to love and to be loved despite the risk of loss. To become a mother myself and relive a lot of my own very early trauma and pain would be the most difficult yet the most healing path. This is why I know, with a surety, that this guidance really was from Him, and that letting Him prevail would not only help to continue the Plan of Happiness for our Heavenly Parents and the Kingdom but that it would also become my personal plan of Happiness and of Healing. 

Reliving some of my trauma from before I was verbal and before I was adopted is hard to describe, but I will try. When our oldest daughter reached the age that I was when my birth mom gave me up for adoption, I would literally cry in between my clients at the spa and sometimes silently cry when they were face down on my treatment table. I just couldn’t fathom how any mother could give away her child- especially after being with her for almost a year. Once I was crying in the breakroom and one of my coworkers also happened to be an adoptee. She had been flown to the US from Seoul Korea when she was just 13 months old. She said she went through this exact same thing and that it peaked when her children reached the same age she was when she was brought to the US. 

She said, “It’s hard not to feel sad- I think what I felt was the grief that I didn’t have this constant Mother, caregiver watching over me from the moment I was born. It’s the feeling that you are missing a mother that you never really knew- it doesn’t take away from our mothers who raised us and loved us- it’s just you feel that loss, that grief. I know. You are not alone.” She held my hands and cried with me from across the break room table. I will never forget that tender mercy. Years and years and years later, after my baptism, the Holy Spirit testified to me that my Heavenly Mother “oversaw my care from the first”. With the way my circumstances played out and how easily it could have gone differently, I have absolutely no doubt that this is true. 

As a new mother, I suffered from intrusive thoughts. I pictured my oldest daughter Isla Rose, then 10 months old, as I put her to sleep in her crib, waking up in a strange place with strange faces around her that she didn’t know. To add a layer to that, I felt guilty and wondered if I was being disloyal to my mom, my mom who raised me from the moment she and my dad brought me home to adopt me– that I was even feeling these feelings. Wasn’t her love and her being my mom enough? Of course she was enough and her love was enough! Yet I had this deep wound that was opened wide- raw and aching, right at the forefront as I mothered my daughter who was the age I was when my birthmother gave me away. 

I ran into our room after she fell asleep and my husband held me as I cried- “Did I wake up and not know where I was?” He looked into my eyes- “You have to remember a few things Ashli. Number one- Isla is not you. You are not your birth mother. You were almost 30 years old when she was born- we wanted her, we planned for her. You have me. You are not alone. She has her father. The second thing that you need to remember is that this is such a testament to YOUR resilience. You lived through it. Yes, you did wake up in a strange crib in a strange place with strange people and you lost your biological mother. But you were brave and resilient and strong and then your parents, your mom and dad, who also really, really wanted you, came to claim you!

Remember when I wrote about meeting with my agent in NYC at age 22 and he said to my husband, “Ashli needs to give her career a solid 10 years and I will castrate you if you get her pregnant before that time.”- exactly 10 years later my husband and I experienced unexplained secondary infertility as we tried to have a sibling for our oldest daughter, Isla Rose. We did several cycles that failed and lost 5 embryos in the process. I remember getting down on my knees thanking Heavenly Father that we had already had Isla because I think if I had gone through that not having had a child already I don’t know if I could have gone on to keep trying. We ended up getting pregnant with our second daughter Everly after two failed cycles right when we were beginning a new cycle without medical intervention. She and Isla are four years apart. We became pregnant again very easily after Everly- Adaline Mae coming 17 months later and Amelia Grace 21 month after Della, once again without any medical intervention. That was the turning point for me in turning my heart and my life over to the Lord- I saw Him in the operating room during her emergency c section delivery. I joined the Church just 13 months later and was pregnant with Adaline. 

To tell you that mothering these four girls has been healing is an understatement. It has been brutal at times- making me look my heartbreak, my pain and my trauma in the eye.

Reliving this trauma happened with each daughter, but each time it was less and less. Each time, I was a little more healed. By the time my fourth daughter Mia came, I felt an understanding and a love for my Birth mom for wanting the best for me- I knew deep down that she wanted me to have everything that she was unable to provide and that she surrendered me out of love. I went through the temple to receive my Endowment when I was pregnant with Mia. As I sat in the bridal suite awaiting to go in and receiving all of my instructions from the Temple President and the Temple Matron, I asked the Temple President, “I don’t know what last name I should use. I have my maiden name from my parents, who are my adoptive parents. I have my last name from my birth mom, and I also have a last name from my biological father.” He smiled and said, “You will always use the last name from your parents who adopted you. And one day, when you are sealed to your parents, it will be they to whom you will be sealed. Your parents who adopted you are your rightful parents.” The Holy Spirit confirmed in that moment that my parents becoming mine had been foreordained. Even though my parents are not members of the church and have left all religion, sharing this experience with them has brought the three of us so much joy. 

Shortly after my baptism when I found my biological father, my birth mom found her biological father too. As I and friends took these biological family names to the temple, their messages were loud and clear: You were not an accident. The Lord sent you here at this prescribed time. We love you. We are aware of you. 

Choosing to become a wife and a mother, to have a family and to prioritize the guidance that this was the Lord’s will for me has made me the chain breaker in my family. The strength to do this has come from the ultimate Chain Breaker, the Waymaker, the Healer, and my Advocate. In exchange for listening to the Lord and setting my heart upon eternal things rather than the things of the world, this journey and these choices have filled the cracks and ridges and broken places in my heart with gold-like a kintsugi bowl. I know myself- if I relied on the praise of the world and the opinions of critics, directors and fans, I don’t think I could have healed out of my pain. I am so grateful for the opportunity to walk the covenant path and to become. I am grateful for the spiritual classroom that my family has been for me. I am so grateful for my Savior who loves me and led me to what I needed most. I am grateful to my Mother in Heaven who never took Her watchful eye off of me.