All Over the Map - Laura Fraser [12]
Somehow, the Outward Bound trip gave my mother more confidence than her other adventures. Despite the fact that she liked to hike and camp, Mom had never really had to rely on herself in the outdoors. “Dad always took care of everything,” she says. He set up the gear and built the fire, and at the end of the day, Mom was still the one making dinner for everyone, even if it was on tin plates, and washing up afterward. He scouted ahead while she held my hand, the youngest and slowest, pulling me up the trail.
On the Outward Bound course, Mom’s patrol camped on the snow, pitched their own tents, rappelled down rock faces, back-packed dozens of miles, and climbed a pink desert mountain in the snow, appropriately named “Fern’s Nipple.” The magazine writer described the biggest challenge: climbing a steep, smooth rock face, with my mother on the ropes behind her. “When I finally see her face, it is transformed: a battle photo—a face under siege … she flops beside me, bursting into tears.” My mother remembers that crying. “It gave us an incredible sense of euphoria to accomplish something that difficult.”
Later she said that the course had given her some of the grit she needed to face a working world that was still, in 1975, fairly hostile to women. It helped steel her for the transition from being a stay-at-home mom to a part-time adviser at an alternative college and then a full-time nursing home residents’ advocate for twenty years, becoming a nationally respected and beloved figure in that field, inducted into the Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame, and, thirty-five years after her work in the civil rights movement, presented with the state’s Martin Luther King, Jr., humanitarian award. She shelved that plaque in the garage with a pile of others, next to a backpack she never wanted to throw away.
In some ways, having the freedom to pursue a career after kids, not to mention far-flung outdoor adventures, my mother did eventually manage to have it all. I’m proud of her and grateful for her spirit, but I sometimes wonder if I’m paying a price for identifying so closely with her desire for independence. Now that I’m forty, I feel a vague sense of defeat, as if I’ve done everything backward, starting with a career, leaving no time for a family. What to do next is completely up in the air. All the uncomplaining toughness and competence I learned as a kid, along with my mile-wide independent streak, may have served me well in the wilderness, at school, and at work and has gotten me a lot of things my mother yearned for—an interesting career, spontaneous travel, varied friends. But it hasn’t done much for my intimate relationships.
My mother has always had my father to fall back on, to saddle her horse and dust her off when she got home. My parents have been married for about fifty years, and though they’ve had some bumps along the way, they are best friends, still make each other laugh, and are impossible to imagine apart.
I, on the other hand, have no man in my life to say, “Go ahead, honey, be independent, it’s adorable.”
IN THE EARLY morning, the sandstone glowing pink from the brand-new sun, I pull out my notebook. Normally, I love to sit and write, especially in front of a stunning landscape. But since Dennis told me I had to write and to make it meaningful, I can’t put down a word. That undoubtedly says something about me that would be worth writing about in itself, but I just can’t. It’s pretty