Late last winter I was ski touring through a wooded alpine glen, eleven-month-old Nicholas on my back and five-year-old Benjamin by my side. For twenty minutes we had been schussing and gliding along, heading for a frozen pond with ice skates and chocolate chip cookies in our packs. Nick was getting heavier by the step, and I started puffing a bit.
"Shh, Mom, shh! You'll scare it," Ben whispered, as he crouched behind a bare aspen trunk.
I looked up through the trees to see a great bull elk nibbling at a few frozen grass stems, as yet oblivious to our intrusion. I heard Nick's contented snores from the backpack. He might miss seeing the elk, but at least he wouldn't alarm it with delighted squeals.
Ben and I watched for a few moments, and my mind drifted back a few years to when I had all but assumed that becoming a mother would mean giving up my ski outings, backpacking trips, and foreign travel.
When my husband, Gordon, and I first discovered I was pregnant, we were packing to leave for a skiing magazine assignment in Europe. Although both of us were enthusiastic about the surprise, we were also a little afraid of what such a change might mean. At that point in our seven-year marriage, we had traveled most of the time, either as adventure travel guides in the Himalayas or on assignment as writers and photographers. Both of us shared a compulsion to explore and experience other cultures and landscapes, usually in remote eddies of the world. Our three-month "honeymoon" was spent working in a destitute refugee camp in Dacca, Bangladesh. Most Christmases had been spent on different sides of some mountain range, and though we had always assumed one day we would have a family, being given a due date was more than a bit intimidating. Back then, my idea of family life included visions of babies born to be cuddled and small children who balked at the mildest hardship. To be a proper mother meant flipping pancakes on Saturday morning rather than fly-fishing hip deep in river water.
It wasn't long after the birth of Ben - an opinionated and rambunctious lad from the start - that I realized there were at least three major errors in my expectations. First, babies don't eat pancakes; second, they're not as fragile as I had thought; and third, my giving up the activities I loved was making everybody miserable - including the baby. Ben would actually stop crying when I carried him outside to look at the trees.
One afternoon, after days of rain had kept us housebound, I rebelled, suited him up, and took him for a hike in the mountains. To my surprise, he laughed and chuckled, completely forgetting the throw his ritual 4:00 P.M. tantrum. I felt I had discovered a new secret of baby care (at least for Ben), and we began taking him out more often. Soon, from the vantage of his backpack, he was skiing, mountain biking, backpacking, and desert camping.
Like Son, Like Mother
It took me several years to realize that becoming a mother had not extinguished my life's love of adventure but had simply changed it and provided new purpose. Of course, these outing weren't quite the same as before Ben was born. We didn't take him to Asia until he turned
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