Scared Shitless and Still Climbing: How I Learned to Be a Mother Without a Mom

Our writer had to find a way to move forward without anyone else holding the ropes.

We were the first to make it to the summit at dawn, seeing the sky turn plum to coral as the sun popped over the peaks. Below us, Mt. Baker’s shadow swept south across the San Juan Islands, Seattle, and nearby Canada. Frozen and tired, the wind whipping from below, my now-husband and I gathered in our puffy jackets and smiled at the camera. I couldn’t feel my body, but I knew my DNA had changed. 

Climbing Mt. Baker, or Kulshan, in Washington felt like climbing on the edge of myself. 

I’d touched that edge once before, ten years before the climb, at the age of 25 when my mother died from a brain aneurysm. 

The Mt. Baker climb was the last mountain in my and my husband’s mission to climb all the volcanoes in Washington. Since my mother’s death, I felt stuck somewhere between a world without her and a world on my own—and hiking was a way to feel alive outside of that. 

Two years after that summit, we had our first child. Giving birth without my mother present further deepened my loneliness, which morphed into intrusive thoughts after my daughter was born. Driving in a car with a three-month-old, death would suddenly appear in the passenger seat, reminding me I could lose her or my husband at any given moment. I was anxious and unsure, unable to be left alone with my thoughts. Those postpartum months were a dark tunnel of panic.

Three years later, our second daughter was born on Sept. 2—the same date my mother died 15 years before, which also happened to be her birthday. I held my newborn tight in her striped blanket, marveling at the serendipity. There was relief. 

I thought of my mountain climb and understood that pain and beauty are often delivered together. I remembered hiking 12 miles uphill in heavy boots in the pitch black, the buzzy silence unsettling and exhilarating, only the crunch of ice under our crampons and the zip zip zip of the rope as we ascended in the dark.

When we reached 9,000 feet, we greeted the Roman Wall, looking up to a sheer 45-degree face of snow and ice that we were going to scale. Faint from exertion, altitude, and waning adrenaline, hands rock-hard from the cold, I pushed on, rest-stepping all the way up. Step, step, breathe. Step, step, breathe.

Holding my youngest in the hospital that quiet night, I realized that climbing that peak was more than mountaineering: It taught me how to hold the ropes of my life together, so I didn’t fall into despair. 

I was a clueless 25-year-old when my most important rope got cut, the one anchoring me to my mother. The devastating loneliness that followed was like the depth of a crevasse. When I became a mom years later, I felt trapped in that chasm without being cinched to a rope team. It felt impossible to push forward without her guidance.

I wondered what my mother would do when my newborn had five ear infections in a row. I wanted to ask her how long it seemed adequate to breastfeed, or how to handle an ever-tantruming 3-year-old. I was too scared to make any decision, for fear that it was wrong. I was always reaching out for my mother, searching for her presence in every experience. 

After winning an award at work, when my youngest daughter was 4, I came home to a celebration in our dining room full of cards and cake crumbs. Chocolate lining her lips, she shouted in her raspy voice across the table, “Mom, I’m so proud. You did it all by YOU-self!”

That’s when I understood that you can’t search for validation from someone who’s no longer there. 

I had been looking for my mom everywhere: in my daughter’s eyes, in my sisters’ arms, on the peaks of mountains.

But she was never there. 

I had to finally do the real, hardest thing: cut the cord between me and her. I had to pull myself out of the attachment abyss. I had to accept that there would be no citrus-scented shoulder to cry on, and no pearly-white smile to say, “you’re doing great.” I had to accept that it was just me—in charge of myself. 

It took years after that sunny spring evening, but today, instead of wavering and wondering what my mom would do in any situation, I trust my gut. I make choices for myself and my kids without waiting for some kind of celestial sign from my mother. Her wise spirit is within me. 

On that mountain summit, a decade and half ago—the ever-changing terrain, led only by the shine of a single headlamp—I learned to trust myself, that I could find my way forward. It wasn’t until years later that I realized this was also an invaluable lesson in motherhood: I can be scared shitless and still keep climbing. 

Now approaching 50, and half my life without my mother, I’ve found that mothering myself while mothering my children is the hardest climb of all. It is a solo climb—a real slog. Yet, like carrying a heavy pack up a mountain, I’ve learned that I can carry the weight of loss every day, and care for myself while tending to others.

My oldest is now a tween—a time when bedrooms look like crime scenes and bathrooms smell like Sephora—and I’m already losing my patience and second-guessing myself. But I will trust that I can follow the path and head in the right direction just like when I mapped out the summit on Mt. Baker. 

This Mother’s Day I will pull on my boots, and hike a local trail. I’ll climb all the way to the top, breathing forward into my next steps.

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