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Diana Saverin | Longreads | December 2, 2025 | 22 minutes (6,145 words)
It was early April in the Brooks Range and I was skinning up to Peregrine Pass in puffy pants and my biggest down parka, the air piercing the few spots of exposed skin on my face. Our keychain thermometer had bottomed out at its limit (-30ºF) when we emerged from the tent a couple of hours before. Also, there was a breeze. As we skied through a shadow I was sure would never end, we barely lifted our heads to gaze at the white-blue landscape around us. This, I thought, was how people imagined Alaska: a vast icy tundra, jagged mountains filled in with snow, cold like you’ve never felt.
I trudged. I “skied.” I withdrew my digits into the belly of my mittens to warm numb fingertips against my palms. Each time I got the screaming barfies—the return of blood flow that somehow felt like a scalding burn—I wondered whether to pause and show David (my husband and trip companion) the tears in my eyes. Sometimes, I did. Other times, I reminded myself that it would pass, that this is what getting warm felt like. I thought of women giving birth. Sometimes, the only way to get somewhere different is to keep going. You can’t stop just because it hurts.
I didn’t know much about birth back then, though—just the dewy faces and labored breathing I’d seen in movies like Father of the Bride Part II. I knew more about reading topographic maps, keeping water bottles from freezing, preparing snacks that won’t chip your teeth in subzero temperatures.
And I wanted to know more: deeper cold, more intense exertion, more paths through a landscape I had grown to love. In those years, I was worried about not getting enough. I feared time was running out; I was afraid that soon, birth would stop being just a metaphor. I was married, 31 years old, and aware that, if I wanted to have children, the trudge-across-the-tundra phase of my life would at some point end. If I became a parent, I wouldn’t be afforded this freedom to seek visceral aliveness and reckless indulgence, this time to put a lot of effort into something for no good reason. If I became a parent, my body would no longer be solely my own.
Even before the tick of my biological clock had grown audible, I’d struggled with this question of enough. When might I feel satisfied, like I didn’t have to prove yet again that I was tough and strong and able to do hard things?
Not yet, it turned out. In past phases of restlessness, I’d often trekked through the Brooks Range, the mountains that arc across Arctic Alaska. When desire sharpened that winter, I suggested to David that we return to those mountains to participate in an adventure race that traverses the range from north to south—the Alaska Mountain Wilderness Ski Classic.
The grassroots “race” has a summer and a winter version, both started in the 1980s. The race involves a dozen (or a couple dozen) people using human power to get from the starting point to the finish, navigating through the backcountry with no outside help. While there is sometimes a checkpoint between beginning and end, participants can choose their routes: There are no trails. Summer participants often backpack and packraft, while winter participants use skis. When we signed up for the winter version of the event, we were signing up to travel more than 180 miles across the Brooks Range in a week.
The “point” of the Classic, if there is one, is to do something hard and test your limits. This was the kind of feat I wanted my body to be capable of. I saw physical exertion as an essential part of myself and my worth, the part I was afraid of losing if I got pregnant. I wanted to push myself in this very specific way while I still could—before giving my body over to another purpose.
There was a time when David and I had discussed trying to get pregnant that spring; I’d put reminders in my calendar to remove my IUD and start taking folic acid. We’d started dating at the end of college and had imagined that we’d have kids between the ages of 27 and 33 (which was easier to say when that sounded so old).
“What do you think they’ll be like?” I asked him at one point.
“Ugly and stupid,” he teased.
Soon after I turned 31, though, I requested a delay, even though the IUD was already out and I’d begun self-administering folic acid. I needed more time. Key word for me: I needed (wanted) more.
I wanted to push myself in this very specific way while I still could—before giving my body over to another purpose.
At the time, I clung to narratives of families who did long treks with young children, trying to believe I could hold on to who I was if I became a mother, but I was also convinced that getting pregnant would mean losing an identity and way of spending time that felt indispensable to who I was. I wasn’t sure who I would be if I couldn’t do hard things outside. And I wasn’t sure what my life would feel like if I couldn’t, every once in a while, gain access to the aliveness and joy I felt pushing myself in the wild.
I still wanted kids, but I felt doubt for the first time in my adult life. Getting pregnant became synonymous with losing myself. I identified so strongly with the outdoors and what my body could do there. And much of what I did—like being away from home for weeks at a time while working as a field instructor, or traversing hundreds of miles while skiing through the Brooks Range—seemed incompatible with becoming a parent.
When David and I discussed our timeline for trying to get pregnant, I often returned to the phrase “the obliteration of self.” What made it feel like obliteration was partly the permanence; I couldn’t un-become a mother. More than that, though, it was a fear that all the specific, hard-won things that made me me—the unusual choices, the physical capabilities, the willingness to do things most people wouldn’t choose—would be subsumed by this new, all-encompassing identity, an identity that billions of women have shared. What I’d built myself into felt singular. I didn’t feel ready to let that go.
It was amid this doubt that the Alaska Mountain Wilderness Ski Classic came to mind. It seemed like a perfect item to check off the recreation bucket list before beginning the procreation one. Signing up for this race wasn’t necessarily a logical response to my fear of becoming a mother; if David and I had children, I’d still have to give up working as a field instructor and doing these kinds of treks, at least for a period of time. But as the idea of motherhood crept closer, I entered a kind of hoarding mindset, anxiously stockpiling as many outdoor experiences as I could, as if those adventures would later sustain me once I couldn’t access them so easily. I believed that at some point, I’d feel satisfied with the experiences I’d amassed, and would finally feel ready to take on a different kind of adventure.
In our Anchorage apartment, I sketched out various routes from the race’s start at Galbraith Lake to its finish in Wiseman. It didn’t take complicated math to realize that the shortest route between these points would require us to ski at least 25 miles a day for a week while carrying winter camping gear for conditions north of the Arctic Circle. It sounded harder than anything David or I had done before. I hoped that this superlative quality of the race would help me reach that elusive destination: enough.
During our 13-hour drive north to Wiseman from our home in Anchorage, David and I joked that the Wilderness Ski Classic would be “preparation for parenting.” Could we support each other when sleep-deprived and in pain and pursuing an unnecessary but arduous goal?
The joke was hitting a little too close to home; it was day 34 of my cycle and my period still hadn’t come. Since I’d had the IUD taken out, I’d been using an algorithm-based app that used basal body temperature as a birth control method. My trust in it was faltering. The week before, I’d frequently opened an incognito window and Googled “ways to induce a period.” I drank a lot of chamomile and ginger tea, to no avail.
“If I were pregnant, how would you feel?” I asked, staring out the window as a semi truck with the words CAUSTIC SODA passed us.
David paused, then said, “About the same as the Wilderness Classic—very excited but very daunted.”
He was reaching certainty about wanting to have kids soon before I was. I started to feel left behind in my drive to hoard experiences. It wasn’t only David who was feeling ready: Our fourth friend in the past month had just shared that she was pregnant, that there was a strawberry-sized being growing inside her, developing tastebuds. I’d started wondering if pregnancy was contagious.
Plumes of snow drifted across the highway and bright blue overflow glistened on the rivers. We were listening to The Sweet Spot, an audiobook about why people take on challenges that often lead to unpleasant experiences. Paul Bloom, the author, takes on questions like, why climb Everest? Why watch horror movies? Why have babies?
He describes how new parents experience a steep drop in their levels of happiness yet eventually report that their lives have more meaning because of their experiences raising children. This is the book’s thesis: that many of us care more about meaning than happiness, and we do hard things to find that meaning.
That pattern of prioritizing meaning (achieved through difficulty) over happiness had long resonated with me. For our honeymoon, David and I spent six weeks walking and floating 300 miles across the Brooks Range. Our socks and boots were drenched nearly every day of the trip; we ran out of food multiple times; we thought of eating instant potatoes and allowing our feet to dry out as “a date.”
But the difficulty of parenting seemed different. While I knew that trips on the land had their own version of monotony, the mundanity of parenting seemed endless, and not in a way that struck me as adventurous: so much laundry, so little free time.
While I knew that trips on the land had their own version of monotony, the mundanity of parenting seemed endless, and not in a way that struck me as adventurous: so much laundry, so little free time.
In Coldfoot, gas cost $6.90 a gallon. I popped inside the truck stop while David refueled. It was 19ºF and wind cut through my puffy. When I returned to the car, I immediately put the seat warmer on.
“We’re going to freeze,” I said.
We’d been refreshing the forecast, which had been predicting that the air temperature our first night would be -28ºF and the windchill would be -55ºF. David floated the idea that we should bail on doing the race at all, even as we kept driving north. I brushed off his concerns, saying we’d figure it out. This is what desire sometimes does: makes me hard to negotiate with.
When I thought about having kids through the lens of a pro/con list, there were often more cons than pros. Cons included the physical toll of pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding; mental health issues during the perinatal period; loss of time and freedom; financial cost; impact on sleep; impact on career; impact on marriage; impact on friendships. The pros were more nebulous: I wanted my life to have purpose; I wanted to give of myself to another; I wanted to experience a love that strong.
A similarly lopsided list applied to a 180-mile race across the Brooks Range in April. There was the risk of frostbite, risk of injury, risk of avalanches, physical discomfort, cost of gear, stress on relationship, missing work, missing school, driving 26 hours roundtrip. And the pros? Witnessing beauty, challenging myself, encountering an edge of human experience, knowing I could do it.
The pro/con imbalance of these two undertakings was similar likely because, in the vein Bloom describes, both the choice to do the race and to have kids didn’t make full logical sense. Both decisions were more about seeking challenge in search of meaning rather than making life easier, less expensive, more comfortable, happier. I trusted that at some point I would want to be a mother, and perhaps the same part of me that came alive in the face of obstacles in the outdoors would emerge in response to nighttime feedings and temper tantrums—the very long endurance race of raising humans.
At the time, though, the desires still felt distinct. With the race, I was shoring up an identity built on experiences of chosen difficulty. And while part of me, deep inside, yearned for the depth of relationship I imagined I’d have with a child, I was still afraid that choosing that path would mean erasing the self I knew. While I of course couldn’t control the weather or the terrain on the race, I could sketch a route through the land, click my boots into my ski bindings, decide to keep going. Motherhood, I feared, would happen to me. I’d lose control, be overtaken.
I’ve never been much of a pro/con list kind of person to begin with; I often heed desire over logic. And I did want both of these things—the race and, eventually, a child—even if neither made complete sense. For the time being, one desire felt like it would make me more of who I already was, and the other would unmake me entirely. The -55ºF forecast didn’t terrify me. Motherhood did.
“Goodbye, trees!” the guy sitting in the van next to me said as the vehicle climbed toward Atigun Pass.
David and I were packed into a van with other Wilderness Ski Classic participants, driving two hours from Wiseman to Galbraith Lake. We discussed the forecast and mused about what a -55ºF windchill might feel like.
“Even if we only go five miles, we’ll feel such triumph tomorrow, just for getting through that,” one of them said.
“I’m not dressed for that,” another replied.
“I’m not emotionally dressed for that,” another chimed in.
We stared at the van’s thermometer on the rearview mirror. We were hopeful when it read five above, then nine! After we crested Atigun Pass, though, it dropped again: -15ºF, -18ºF.
“It’s like watching the New Year’s countdown,” someone mused.
“Except you don’t know when it’s going to end,” someone else said.
The thermometer reached -20ºF.
“We’re in a new year now!”
The banter kept us cheery, making the cold seem funny rather than threatening. Someone told the story about how Dave, the event’s organizer, participated in the race one year when the van’s thermometer had read -61ºF. He and his partner were the only ones who set out; everyone else drove south in the van again. Apparently, he’d pointed to his finger while telling the story and said, “See, that one’s a little shorter than the other.”
“I’m impressed he only lost some of his finger,” someone said.
I was still sitting inside the van, with the heat on, and my toes were already cold.
I got my period during my first pee break that first day of the race.
“Mazel Tov,” David said.
I stared at the pale red splattered in the snow. I was relieved that I wouldn’t spend the first weeks of pregnancy pushing my body as hard as I ever had. I was grateful, too, that my body hadn’t gotten pregnant without my permission. But there was also a faint trace of disappointment; until we tried, I wouldn’t know whether my body could make a child. As nervous as I was about motherhood, I was even more afraid of that prospect: asking my body to do something and not being able to will it to happen. It didn’t make complete sense. I wanted to know my body was capable of something I wasn’t ready for it to do. I wanted assurance that the choice would be mine.
I wanted to know my body was capable of something I wasn’t ready for it to do. I wanted assurance that the choice would be mine.
Mostly, though, I felt dread as I rifled through my backpack for my Diva Cup. There were 15 participants in the race that year; four of us were women. I wanted to whine to one of them. I’d have to empty and clean the cup when air temperatures reached -35ºF. I’d have to scrub the silicone with sugar snow.
That first afternoon was bright and surprisingly warm. David and I skied with few breaks, traversing the tundra, sliding across the glare ice of a lake then a creek. At one point, we took our skis off to hike across bare tussocks. We mused at fox and caribou and wolverine tracks. I started to believe that we could do this, that we were strong enough, that we’d make it.
When the sun dropped, though, we couldn’t keep our feet or hands warm, so decided to set up camp around 10 p.m. As my teeth chattered inside my sleeping bag, I finally believed the forecast. David lay next to me in our blue tent, zipped into his sleeping bag. We were on this journey together, but each had to find it within ourselves to ski all day, to monitor how cold our fingers got, to keep ourselves hydrated and fed and warm.
When we woke the next morning, the mercury in our thermometer sat at its lowest point: -30ºF. We packed as quickly as we could, then made stuttering progress on the frozen creek. Overflow had spilled water on top of the ice and refrozen in uneven patterns, which made for awkward skiing. We couldn’t exert ourselves enough to get warm. I paused to tug my hands out of my mittens and stuff them inside my coat to warm against my collarbone. I shed panicked tears when the blood rushed to my fingers in a hot lick of pain. Several times, we stopped to warm our bare feet on each other’s bellies. I shimmied David’s inside my coat, where his toes pressed against my ribs and his icy soles warmed, skin-to-skin.
A few springs before, a friend and I did a different ski trip across the Brooks Range. For the second week of our 15-day trek, our keychain thermometer also lingered at the coldest temperature it registered (-20ºF); we didn’t know exactly how cold it was, but we knew it was cold. In the mornings, she and I sat in our sleeping bags, ate frozen brownies, swallowed caffeine pills, and sang “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” trying to rev ourselves up for the day. At some point, we began inventing our own loopy lyrics about our return to civilization: our chorus was “The Land of Basic Comforts.”
During those frigid mornings, I eventually faced the worst part of the day: getting out of my sleeping bag and putting on my frozen boots. By then, I had blisters the sizes of silver dollars on both heels. As I tried to stuff my feet into the boots, the blisters pressed against the cold-hardened leather and I howled in pain.
“Think of pregnancy!” my friend said.
This friend did not want children, but knew I did. I assume she chose to cheerlead me this way because of how challenging and all-consuming pregnancy symptoms are. You can’t opt out of morning sickness or back pain. You can’t quit labor once you start. In best-case scenarios, pregnancy and parenthood are choices people make, paths they opt into. Once on the path, though, what was once a choice becomes necessity; a baby needs care. Though far less permanent and consequential, our trek was similar. We’d elected to take on this journey, but once we were out there, necessity took over. We needed to get out of our sleeping bags. We needed to protect our digits from frostbite. We needed to eat enough calories and drink enough water and ski enough miles.
Still, I didn’t think pregnancy was actually like having blisters, or giving birth was like carrying a heavy sled across the snow, as a friend’s mom suggested when she told me, “giving birth is going to be nothing for you.” I didn’t know what either would actually be like. I could read about my insides being seized by contractions, my ligaments stretching, my perineum tearing, but I didn’t actually know what any of that felt like. I didn’t know what being a parent would be like, either; David and I may have joked that our trip was “preparation for parenting,” but that was likely because we had no idea what we’d be getting into in having a child. What I did know is that you can’t choose to take the bus south again if it’s -61ºF, or hop on a plane as soon as you reach Anaktuvuk Pass. Whatever comes up, whoever the child is, whatever life and body changes arise as you take the journey, you’re along for the ride.
On the trail, David and I ate Cheez-Its, Goldfish crackers, tortilla chips, Reese’s, Snickers, Bobo’s, wasabi peas, plus homemade treats of dried caribou, peanut butter balls, granola clusters, and coconut cookies. In winter conditions, most energy bars freeze so solid they break your teeth, so we’d made food rich in fat—peanut butter, butter, and coconut oil—to stay soft when temperatures dropped. We used our stove to melt snow for water, but didn’t prepare any hot meals or drinks, both to save time in the mornings and evenings and to protect our fingers from frostbite while futzing with lighters. We ate snacks from our sleeping bags in the mornings and evenings, then every hour or so throughout the day, and popped caffeine pills when we needed a boost.
On the Anaktuvuk River, streams of snow swiveled in the wind over bare ice, mimicking the northern lights that had colored the sky in the cold centers of night. We stepped on the ice and let the breeze absorb us in its roar. It pushed us forward, our skis clacking over the frozen water. I squinted ahead for snow patches, wanting to slow myself down, afraid of spinning out of control. At some point, though, I gave up and let my body become a sail.
I squinted ahead for snow patches, wanting to slow myself down, afraid of spinning out of control. At some point, though, I gave up and let my body become a sail.
We took a break on the side of the ice. I tried to bend down to fill my Nalgene with overflow, but everything I carried in my jacket got in the way.
“Maybe this is what it’s like to be pregnant,” I teased. “I can’t see over my fanny pack or the water bottles I’m keeping warm inside my jacket.”
“Our fanny packs weigh more than a newborn,” David teased. When we weighed them in Wiseman, they’d clocked in at 10 pounds each. Still, we could take them off whenever we chose to. They didn’t cause acid reflux or nausea. They didn’t need to shapeshift to fit through the bowl of my pelvis.
That evening, we reached the village of Anaktuvuk Pass, the race’s lone “checkpoint.” We skied down the street, passing colorfully painted homes and dogs leaping toward us from their chains. We sat with another team also resting in town, Danny and Andrew, and got updates about other participants: One guy had bailed at the start line and three more were flying out from Anaktuvuk, mostly due to frostbite. We would later learn that, of the four people who’d taken the eastern route, one had flown out because of frostbite and the other three wouldn’t make it to Wiseman before the cutoff for the race. In the end, only seven of the original 15 participants would finish.
Andrew was among those who’d decided to bail from Anaktuvuk. As we talked with him, a man who worked for the North Slope Borough pulled up in a truck and congratulated us on making it that far.
“People don’t realize what you go through out there. -50ºF, you all experienced that,” he said.
“Our thermometer only read -35ºF,” said Andrew.
“Yeah, but the wind. Here, it was -42ºF with 20 knots—very quickly that’s -80ºF. Not much survives that.”
“Especially skin cells,” Andrew replied as he rubbed his battered feet. They were white and wrinkled, spotted with red circles and blisters.
The crescent moon grew and my bleeding slowed. Huge flocks of ptarmigan lifted into the sky like a gill net drying in the sun. We passed tracks of wolf, wolverine, lynx. One afternoon, we saw bear tracks—our first of the season. That night, we slept out without a tent, trying to save a little time by not pitching it, and my mind circled the same thought: The bears are awake, the bears are awake.
We had one warm day. We took our first selfie of the trip. It was still, 25 degrees, and my body felt comfortable. In this picture together, our eyes are squinting into the sun and there are streaks of zinc on our cheeks.
We paused on a saddle, where I stripped down to my sun shirt and tightened the hood to protect my face from sunburn while David changed his layers.
“What a babe,” I teased.
He wiggled, bare-chested, in response. The mountains around us rose sharp and white against a deep blue sky and we were flirting. We’d come a long way from that cold morning trudging up a shadow toward Peregrine Pass.
When I overtook David on our trail that day, I sometimes pecked his cheek with chapped lips, then skied on, skate skiing into the sunset, or letting overflow pour over my boots, the thin ice crackling and tearing like bubble wrap. In some moments, the fear, joy, and exhaustion morphed into euphoria; the dusky sky reflected on the glossy water; the colors grew more saturated in the reflection; my skis sliced through the lurid painting; my body moved with what felt like ease.
It’d be easy to say that those moments—of effervescent giddiness and awestruck wonder—are what I was looking for, that they were the reason I needed to keep pushing back the start date of our pregnancy attempts. In some ways, they were a draw, as well as the moments I remember best from the trip—even though they made up a small fraction of our 12-plus-hour days of skiing. As Paul Bloom observes in The Sweet Spot, we value suffering when it leads to delight, and we value pain and challenge when it allows us to shake off the feeling of being conscious of ourselves. “You just are,” he writes.
It’d be easy to say that those moments—of effervescent giddiness and awestruck wonder—are what I was looking for, that they were the reason I needed to keep pushing back the start date of our pregnancy attempts.
But those moments were certainly not the only draw. There was the future-oriented appeal, of knowing that we’d done it. There was also a pleasing simplicity. My world winnowed to melting snow for water, keeping my extremities from getting frostbite, moving as efficiently as possible. And perhaps the simplest part is that I didn’t need to check anyone else’s extremities for cold. If I became a parent, I knew my attention would always be divided.
I only cried once. I’d spent the day hobbling, my knee pain sharp and unrelenting. My sleeping bag, rated to -60ºF, had clumps of frozen feathers, despite my attempts to dry the down in the sun during the day by hanging the bag over my backpack like a cape. I shivered in it that night, doing a few sit ups to try to get warm. David seemed distant right before we went to sleep. I prodded, wanting to know what was wrong. He told me it was hard to be around me when I was being negative.
I cracked open then, even as I wondered if the tears would dehydrate me and force me to use more of our precious water supply. I feared what he thought of me. I wanted him to treat me like a woman giving birth: tell me I was doing great and was so strong and to just keep breathing.
On the last day, I consumed 400 milligrams of caffeine, 2400 milligrams of ibuprofen, 1500 milligrams of acetaminophen. Making my knee pain tolerable became more important than protecting my kidneys.
That afternoon, we caught up to the group of four in front of us and they cheered. It didn’t feel like a race; they were in the lead and happy to have extra help breaking trail. Katie said how nice it was that we’d all finish together. We asked get-to-know-you questions, talked about injuries and animal sightings, shared snacks, traded notes about the cold. This was an unexpected draw of the race: I’d often done these kinds of trips alone or with just one other person. The sense of community out on the land, even if we only saw people a few times over the course of the week, provided a buoy. When we saw ski tracks, we often mused about who made them, how they were doing. We noted where others had camped or peed.
After six and a half days, we saw the highway. It was around 9 p.m. and twilight bathed the world in pinks and purples. We skied into Wiseman, approached the cabin where we’d arrived a week before, and raced to the end. As David and I got close, we high-fived the other skiers. We passed through a string tied with a piece of paper: FINISH.
Six of us had made it, and the seventh finisher, Danny, would arrive in a few hours. The communal feeling bloomed as we feasted together inside the cabin lodge. We ate salad with sesame dressing and roasted potatoes and steak. I peeled off my boots, socks, and the Leukotape on my feet. I was alarmed by what I saw: My big toe was white and there was fluid under my toenails; there was a dark spot and several blood blisters on my middle toe. Still, it was better than other extremities I saw in the room, which included bulbous blisters on frostbit fingers, feet ragged and pale with trench foot. Uta, whose cabin we were staying in, said it was the most frostbite she’d seen in her decades of helping with the race.
When Danny arrived, we listened to his stories about falling into the North Fork of the Koyukuk. The binding on one of his skis had broken, which meant he’d skied the last 50 miles with his boot strapped to his ski with various neon-colored Voile straps.
“It’s Teenage Ninja Turtle in the front, party girl in the back,” he joked.
When he took the boots off, his feet looked ragged—white and pruned, blistered and torn.
We stayed up until 1 a.m. talking about skiing and animals and Alaska and our families. Some of the participants had kids. For Katie, it was her first Classic since having a baby; her daughter was three. I congratulated her, then her pal said, “And you dominated!”
I didn’t yet know what kind of mother I would be—if leaving my child for a week to cross the tundra at -30ºF would appeal—but it was heartening to see that she, at least, hadn’t fully lost herself. Here she was, a few years after giving birth, breaking trail across the Arctic. Her example didn’t make me feel ready for motherhood myself, but I held onto the details she shared: how she’d trained more efficiently than before having her daughter, how she and her husband now traded off experiences out on the land. It offered a faint hope that the self I’d been and the one I might become as a parent could someday coexist.
The next day, David and I drove south, our car caked with dirt. My feet were so swollen they didn’t fit in my shoes; I made the questionable decision of wearing down booties in public.
During a Zoom seminar about literary theory the next night, I Googled “frostbite black toenail” and examined my middle toe with my iPhone flashlight. When I visited my parents, I tried to hide my purple toe from them.
The race helped soothe my restlessness, at least for a little while; I was content to spend a sunny day inside. Before my blisters healed, though, I started dreaming of doing the race again the following year, as well as bigger trips, like traversing all of Alaska by foot. If I did that, I wondered, would I be satisfied? Would that trip be superlative enough? I jokingly called this hypothetical trek “my last hurrah” and decided to plan it for right before our new timeline for trying to get pregnant. I wondered: Would I be ready to have a child after that? Or, by the end of that trip, would I just come up with another trip I had to do?
I’ve learned the same lesson about desire again and again. Doing something I’ve dreamed of doesn’t necessarily check something off the list as much as it adds several more items to it. For years, I’ve tried to work on contentment, to balance striving in the direction of what I want with being grateful for what I have. Wanting to be a parent was another expression of desire. In some ways, it was a much scarier desire than the one to do a trip through the Brooks Range: Once you embarked on that journey, there would be no end point, and I would have way less control of what happened along the way, less control of even if the journey could happen at all. It wasn’t a matter of willpower, of popping ibuprofen and skiing through the night.
The skin on my chin stayed scaly, flaking off if I touched my face. I stacked pillows in my bed at night, hoping to drain my swollen feet. I hobbled around, stretched my IT band in public, and tried physical therapy, dry needling, and Rolfing to soothe my knee pain.
“Well, maybe we should try to get pregnant now,” I joked to David one day. I couldn’t exert myself much with my injured knee. What is a body for, I mused, if not to be used?
I write these last paragraphs a few years later, my daughter asleep in the next room, another child growing inside me. My body has been wrung out by their use: my pelvis dismantled, my ribcage cramped, my nipples sucked raw. I used to tell myself the arduousness of backcountry treks would somehow prepare me for this season of life, make me more capable of the demands of pregnancy and birth and motherhood, though I am not sure it actually translated.
It’s interesting to remember the belief I had when David and I did this race that if I did enough backcountry trips, at some point, I would have gotten enough, that I would at some point feel satisfied and ready to move on to the next season. But the “more” I sought wasn’t something I could ski toward, at least not something I could reach; the horizon recedes in the distance as you approach it. I’d spent years wanting proof that I could do hard and unusual things, that I was special, that I was enough. I believed my worth depended, in large part, on my physical capabilities. I may not have said it explicitly back then, but I feared I would lose that worth if I gave those things up, if I did something as ordinary as having a child. I sketched route after route across this land, trying to pack in as much as I could, but in the end, I had to grieve those lines drawn on maps, mourn the self I became when trudging hundreds of miles across the tundra.
Sometimes I find it jarring to remember that former self, the one who could ski all day, the one who only had to worry about the temperature of her own digits. This was what I feared in having kids: losing the self I believed to be me. It’s still unsettling to reckon with just how much I have transformed. Are these versions even the same self anymore?
What has surprised me, in motherhood, is how easy it has been to “lose” what I was clutching and how seldom I’ve longed for that past self I was afraid would disappear. But loss is not the same thing as change. Much of the time since becoming a parent, I’ve been too absorbed in what I’ve gained to continue grieving for what I’ve given up. Yes, I stockpiled a lot of wild experiences, but I don’t find myself raiding that stash of memories very often, even if I’m grateful for the experiences I’ve had. In motherhood, time and memory work differently; there aren’t specific treks that I’m proud to have done, or routes I need to try. I’m not protecting against a future scarcity as much as showing up, as best I can, for this present, and learning how to give the best of what I have away.
Diana Saverin is a writer who lives in Anchorage, Alaska. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Outside, The Guardian, and others.
Editor: Krista Stevens
Copyeditor: Peter Rubin
