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The Great Outdoors: A Family Affair
| Article
# : |
18017 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1990 |
2,468 Words |
| Author
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Meredith Nelson Wiltsie
Meredith Nelson wiltsie has written extensively for outdoor
magazines. She lives in Bishop, California. |
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
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