When Brittney made a wish one night with her new husband Hunter, over a perfectly broken down the middle wishbone, she never could have imagined what would happen next. She talks fondly of their first meeting. “It was love at first sight. We were married two months after we met.” Tucking away their secret wishes in a zip lock baggie in the freezer, those wishes would sit until one fateful day when Brittney learned Hunter had been killed in the line of duty. He was 21 and it was his first deployment to Afghanistan.
Finding out they were pregnant a couple months before he left, Brittney miscarried the night before he deployed. “There was so much emptiness. I wasn’t coping well.” She explains. One day her cousin asked her to go for a run with her. Never exercising a day in her life, Brittney got the courage up and reluctantly said yes. That day she put on her running shoes, Brittney sealed in a new fate. By the end of that year, she had worked up to completing a half marathon. “It saved me,” she explains. “Running got me out of the house and allowed me to process my thoughts.”
Another 6 months later Brittney was spending her savings to create a fitness line for women coping with loss or tragedy through fitness. Her tagline? “Turn struggle into strength.” Brittney explains how important it is to her to keep production local and hire veterans to help the cause. And all of her line is proudly Made in America. “I didn’t know anything about the military until I met Hunter. Now it’s my life’s purpose to bring awareness to how much service members do for us. They put everything on the line. And this way, I can continue to honor Hunter’s memory.”
After Hunter’s death, Brittney’s family helped move her stuff out of the house they shared because she couldn’t bare to go back in. “I told my sister to grab the zip lock baggie in the freezer. My wish read, ‘to get pregnant.’ His wish read, ‘to have a baby.’ We figured out the night we conceived and it was that night we made our wishes.” She pauses. “Sometimes life doesn’t turn out the way we think it will, but it’s still beautiful.”
Fast forward 10 years and you’ll find Brittney’s IG filled with photos of a man named George. Their smiles are so big as she walks us through their romance, getting married and buying a house. “Life is easy because of you,’ she writes. They welcomed baby Jane last fall.