How One Family Survived a Holiday Deployment During First Child's Birth

My mother's family is such a huge mess of grandparents and grown kids and grandkids and now great-grandkids that Christmas means not having a place to sit down while gorging on all the homemade chocolates and goodies our grandmother has so faithfully produced every year since time immemorial.

And in a stroke of holiday genius, the celebration has been firmly assigned to Christmas Eve so that as families grow and branch out, no one is ever tempted away to an in-law's Christmas dinner to the detriment of the Jones' family gathering. So we cousins, and there are many of us, cannot now imagine Christmas without this day of sugar-overload and hour-long present exchanges and bizarre family traditions.

Nowadays we follow it all up with nostalgic trips down memory lane aided by the crate-load of old videos which we find much more amusing than our new husbands and wives will ever understand.

There are some of us who have never missed a single Christmas Eve. Not one. At least not until the year that our beautiful, blue eyed soccer star decided to join the army, move away, get married, and get pregnant. And we were all very proud of her. Even if she was the only one living outside of a 100 mile radius. She was so far away that we all ticked down the final days of her pregnancy, knowing that if she went too late the two of them would never be able to travel in time for the holidays.

Unfortunately, our fears were realized. So Christmas Eve we gathered round the computer to view emailed scans of the first great-grandchild and her ever-gorgeous mother. We passed around printouts of the photos and tried to make sense of the gaping hole the separation left in our gathering.

But despite our disappointment, there was one missing family member who had never had a chance to be home, whose absence was more complete and profound than the rest of us could ever comprehend. The baby's father, David, who was stationed far away in Iraq, missing both the birth of his daughter and any semblance of a normal Christmas.

I got a chance this year to ask them both about their experiences, and how they coped.