The Day I Learned My “Why”

Every day is a hard day, but the “firsts” are the hardest. Thanksgiving. Christmas. The boys’ birthdays. Their first days of school. Mother’s Day. (Unbearable.) Father’s Day. Steve and Allie’s tenth wedding anniversary. Each of these days. Every day. They’re all so hard.

But, for me, the hardest day, even harder than Mother’s Day, will be September 13. Steve’s birthday.

I wasn’t supposed to be able to get pregnant. The doctors had told me I’d need fertility treatments. In February 1985, I was an active-duty soldier freezing my butt off on a field exercise in Germany. I could barely wake up in the morning; the smell of stale coffee from the mess tent nauseated me. Something was off.

When we got out of the field, I took two home pregnancy tests. Surprise! My husband and I began to refer to our baby in utero as “the Christ child” — though this miracle conception was obviously due to incompetent doctors, and the birth father was most certainly not God.

Being pregnant on active duty in the 80s was typically frowned upon, but the leadership in my unit was supportive and my pregnancy was, fortunately, easy. The only impact I felt was my growing belly. A month before my due date, the battalion commander called me into his office. Concerned, he asked, “Should you still be running PT?”

Baby Steve spent nine months under a set of oversized BDUs, a large yellow banana PT suit, and occasionally, the pregnancy uniform of elasticized green slacks and tunic top. Every day during my pregnancy at Michael Barracks in Hochst, West Germany, I walked to the corner store and bought a pint of chocolate milk to have with my lunch. Steve was probably destined from the start to wear an Army uniform and love PT and chocolate milk.

I forget what happened last week, but I remember every detail of September 13, 1985. This, combined with my fervent desire to have my kids think I’m tough, meant that every year, I’d tell Steve his birth story.

My husband, also a soldier, was in the field, three hours away by helicopter, so I drove myself to the hospital. They told me to go home, walk around, and come back in a few hours. I drove home, walked up the eight flights of stairs to our apartment, grabbed my overnight bag, walked the mile back to the hospital, and admitted myself. This was before cell phones. On the landline at the hospital, I called my husband’s unit, and someone left a message in the gym where he was in Bremerhaven. He flew back to Frankfurt, in plenty of time, because baby Steve took his time making an entrance.

The very first thing my firstborn taught me was humility. I was not nearly as tough as I thought I was. When I entered serious labor, you may have heard me. Steve taught me there are certain things I have no control over. Thirty-eight years later, on November 10, 2023, I learned this again. Packing a bag for the unknown. Dry heaving in the driveway. My body revolting. Birth. Death. I have no control.

But the most important thing I learned on September 13, 1985, concerned love and purpose. Steve was our firstborn. His birth changed my life. Despite my exhaustion and my worries that I knew nothing about being a mother, I felt overwhelming, immeasurable love toward this tiny baby boy in my arms. It was an infinite love that would grow exponentially, unconditionally, until it transformed itself into grief on November 10, 2023.

They say the two most important days in your life are the day you were born and the day you find out why. September 13, 1985, I found out my “why”. I’d been a hard-charging active-duty Army officer, but on that day, and in the months that followed, I realized my purpose. I was a mom. Yes, I was a wife, a daughter, a sister, a friend, a soldier. Over the following years, I’d be a volunteer, a teacher, a coach, a writer. But since September 13, 1985, above all else, I’ve been a mom. It’s who I am.

I’m still a mom. And now a grandmom. But as Steve’s birth changed our lives, so did his death. There was SO MUCH LOVE before November 10 and all of it — wham! — transformed itself immediately into grief! And since that horrendous day, there’s SO MUCH GRIEF! It’s hard to see through the sadness!

The grief is as powerful and overwhelming as the love was; the grief is love stuck in tears and sorrow. I’ve been wrestling with this question: How do we release it? How can we let the grief seep out and shift back into the love it was before November 10? I’ve learned that it’s like labor again. Slow and painful. But necessary. Because my purpose, the one I learned on September 13, 1985, did not change on November 10, 2023. And I need that love to live my purpose.

So, yes, this year, Steve’s birthday will be the hardest day for me. Maybe because it’s the “first”. But I doubt it. I have a feeling it will always be the hardest day for me. I just hope and pray that as more and more of my grief morphs back to the love it was before his death, the world becomes a better place, just as it did on September 13, 1985.