Downward dog

"My perspective completely flip-flopped when I was nearly 33. I remember the exact moment."

by Tracy R. 

When I was a little girl, I knew I would someday be a mom. The day couldn't come fast enough, and I often played “house” and pretended to be a mom with a baby (or sometimes twins!).
 
As much as I was a tomboy, I often brought along my baby dolls on adventures. I would climb up trees with them, strap them to my bicycle, take them on secret missions to hiding places, like the narrow, over-vegetated space between the fences that lined our backyard. I also loved my matchbox cars, and when Micro-Machines became popular, I quickly assigned them as the matchbox "kids". Even my drawings and made-up stories had kids, or they felt incomplete.
 
My desire to have kids vanished once I entered college. There were way too many other exciting things to distract me. Also, my high school best friend became pregnant right as we were getting ready to pack our bags and head toward the much-anticipated college life. Our plans to be freshman roommates in the dorms crumbled before my eyes. We parted with big hugs and big tears, knowing our lives were headed in very different directions. I left for college alone, and she stayed in our hometown to get married and become a mom.
 
It didn't take long for me to get completely immersed in college life and the outdoorsy town of Durango that I now call home. I met a group of rock-climbing fanatics and began joining them to climb sandstone walls and towers in the desert around Moab.
 
During my sophomore year, I studied abroad in Ecuador, which gave me the travel bug and put marriage and babies even further down the list of my hopes and dreams. All I could think about was planning my next adventure.
 
I kept in touch with my high school friend as she had her second child and, soon after, a third. With each passing year, we had less and less in common. As I saw her gain weight and battle depression, I became convinced I did not want to have kids. I enjoyed my freedom way too much.
 
Eventually, I met the man who would become my best adventure partner and husband. Sparks flew when Jarrod and I embarked on a self-supported bike tour down the Baja Peninsula. We fell in love with bike touring (and each other), and from then on, we constantly sought new adventures together. Each bike tour, backpacking trip, and mountain bike excursion made us more certain that kids were not in our future.
 
For some reason, it is common for people in our society to ask newlyweds when they will have children. In some ways, the expectation that we should have kids made us more determined to live life differently. Neither of us felt the urge to procreate and change up our fun way of life together. I started a running list of "Reasons to Not Have Kids,” which I would recite when people asked the dreaded question, “When will you have kids?”
 
After eight years together, my perspective completely flip-flopped when I was nearly 33. I remember the exact moment. Oddly enough, my point of view literally turned upside-down. I was doing yoga on the beach in Costa Rica, deep in a downward-dog position, when I sensed a presence getting close to me. I pried open my eyes to find a barely walking toddler approach me and then mimic my pose.
 
There I was, hands and feet on my mat and butt up in the air, with the tiniest little boy doing the exact same thing next to me. We shared this adorable moment before his embarrassed dad came over to take him away. Then, about 30 seconds later, the little yogi came waddling back, curious about what I was up to. His dad came to get him again, speaking to his son in Spanish and apologizing to me in English.

​Now it was my turn to be curious. I asked where they were from and was fascinated to learn that they spent half the year in the U.S. and half the year in Costa Rica. He and his wife were bringing up their son bilingually, exposing him to two different cultures. Suddenly, I was seeing parenthood through a different lens.
 
To my surprise, Jarrod had recently been thinking about the idea of kids, too. We had spent the previous month apart, as I was guiding trips in Costa Rica, and he was managing his cafe back in Durango. When he flew in to spend my last two weeks in Costa Rica with me, Jarrod—not me—brought up kids first.
 
That monkey- and sloth-filled trip convinced us that we did want to have our own kid. We wanted to bring our child to places like Costa Rica and experience new adventures—as parents.
 
Fast forward to a year later: my good friend Joy is talking about plans for "Operation Insemination" (aka, all of us friends getting pregnant at the same time). Yeah right! These things cannot be planned. Besides, I was not quite yet ready. Jarrod and I still had a lot of non-kid traveling to do.
 
Fast forward two years later. Jarrod and I live deep in the San Juan National Forest and work at an old mining town turned Relais et Chateau Resort. We have sold the cafe and traveled by bike, train, truck, and boat for six months. We are now making less money than we earned in college and are living in a remote location that is far from conducive to raising a kid. Yet, we finally feel ready to be parents (or at least try).
 
Fast forward another eight months. I am very pregnant and expecting a baby in two
months! Jarrod and I are making plans to move back to Durango and begin "nesting," as they call it. We are beyond excited to start our next big adventure with our child. What's even more exciting and shocking is that several of my friends are also pregnant and expecting babies around the same time. That's right. "Operation Insemination" somehow, actually, miraculously worked.
 
I have no hesitations about deciding to bring a child into this world. In fact, having a baby feels so natural now, like I’ve always wanted this. My baby-obsessed, child-self would have rolled her eyes and given me a "told you so!" smirk at this realization. Perhaps I was always meant to be a mom; I just needed to do a few things on my own first.
 
Here's to not rushing, to not necessarily doing what society expects of us, to completely changing perspectives, and to embarking on new adventures. Let the next one begin!