I will never forget how helpless I felt on Jan. 24 when I watched my son stumble across the wrestling mat. He took two major blows to the head during a match – a sound I could hear from the top of the gym bleachers. As he struggled to orient himself, I felt like I was going to throw up.
In a matter of seconds, he was on his back convulsing with trainers at his side trying to take off his shoulder brace so he could breathe. Sweat poured off his body in a way no workout ever could have done.
I held my hand over my mouth and wailed, watching nearly 13 years of hard work, sacrifice and commitment get carried off the mat on a stretcher. I knew in my heart that this was not a “shake it off” moment as they raced him to the emergency room by ambulance.
By God’s grace, the X-ray of his neck was clear. He never lost consciousness. He answered his questions correctly. Minus the uncomfortable neck brace, within an hour, our son seemed a little drowsy, but normal. We were able to leave Loyola Hospital in Chicago later that day and made it home through the snow that night. With time and rest, he was expected to make a full recovery, but it just wasn’t enough time for his brain to heal to allow him to wrestle in his senior year state series starting a couple of days later.
As a parent, this was a pretty excruciating moment because for thousands of days, I watched this kid commit his whole heart to this sport – a three-time state qualifier who overcame a hip avulsion fracture suffered during his sophomore year during the state tournament, a car accident at the end of his junior season and a torn labrum in his shoulder just weeks after his senior season began. It seemed like all of that was enough. And yet the disappointment was not over.
If I can be honest, I’m angry. Not at anyone in particular, but I’m just angry at the way it played out for him. There is nothing worse than watching your kid hurt and not be able to fix it.
The following weekend of regionals was hard to sit through, though we absolutely wanted the best for his teammates. At church the next day, some friends we hadn’t seen in a while came up and talked to our son. I overheard him say, “Wrestling is something I do, it’s not who I am.”
Parallel Paths: From the Mat to the Ranch
Fast forward a few days to the Top Producer Summit where I listened to a powerful panel. Leaders of top companies in agriculture weighed in on a variety of thought-provoking topics, but one message stood out to me.
“All too often, we confuse what we do with who we are,” said Lamar Steiger with The 808 Ranch. “As farmers and ranchers, we are our job. It’s our identity. That was my problem as a young man.”
Steiger grew up on a dairy. High interest rates in the late 1970s made farming particularly challenging. When he was in his 20s, their family lost the dairy. After working so hard to make that operation work, Steiger took this as a deep personal failure.
“There was nothing I could do to save the dairy because outside forces were at hand. But it’s so hard for farmers and ranchers to separate that,” he said. “Looking back, I had depression for quite a while after that, but we didn’t talk about that then.”
When he was in his mid-30s, Steiger attempted suicide.
“I had to be removed totally from my working life and start completely over,” he shared. “I learned the hard way how to separate my identity from my role.”
Steiger said it wasn’t pretty, but he is grateful for how this time of his life changed him.
“When you come to the end of yourself, you look for something bigger and better. That’s worked out really good for me,” he said. “Being a rancher is cool to me, but it’s not who I am. I’m Lamar. I try my best and I fail. We have great successes and then we have some things that just don’t work out. But it’s not all my responsibility.”
There’s something so humbling about another person vulnerably sharing their story. We can learn so much from each other. All it takes is a willingness to share your story. Left unshared, our stories may only change us. But by sharing, we can help each other find our way through the very real burdens of life.
A Truth Worth Holding Onto
It’s easy to confuse your identity with what you do because it becomes such a big part of our lives. As another Shike kid closes one chapter and gets ready to start the next, I find myself confusing who I am with my role as a mom. I’m not sure what life looks like without Saturday wrestling tournaments and late nights posting photos of our wrestlers.
As I sat there at Top Producer Summit, I kept hearing my son’s voice in my head saying, “Wrestling is something I do, it’s not who I am.”
He’s only 17 and has a lot of life to live, but I’m grateful he recognizes this truth. I know there will be times when he will be tempted to measure his worth by his performance. But I believe when we get honest and share these stories, we can help one another avoid the mistake of confusing what we do with who we are.
