Pumping Milk on a Hanging Belay: The Non-traditional Trad Mom

Eight months after having my second baby, I’m at the base of Black Magic (5.8), a four-pitch trad route in Red Rock. I’m still wrapping my head around the fact that I’m here in Las Vegas as a breastfeeding mom, two states away from my kids on some sort of diabolical day trip that started at 4am and will culminate in a hellish 9pm flight. I haven’t touched real rock since I catapulted my life into the entirely different stratosphere of motherhood three and a half years ago. And last week, over one too many cocktails (exactly one, for the record), my climbing partner Lauryn and I decided that today was the day to make our valiant return.

Lauryn and I have been climbing trad together for over a decade. Neither of us have had any mentors—just each other, figuring it out as we went. We’re notorious for running out lesser-known 5.9s, getting sandbagged, spending as much time off-route as on-route, occasionally dressing up in men’s Hawaiian t-shirts, and always being the ones having the most fun on the wall.

My transition to motherhood definitively got in the way of our fabled climbing exploits—and we were ready for a comeback. The only snag: breastfeeding. As in, my baby drinks only the milk I make. If you’re unfamiliar with the rigamarole of pumping, believe me when I say it’s a whole thing. No one I know likes pumping, and I had tried to avoid it as much as possible. But I wasn’t ready to stop breastfeeding. (Even if I was, one can’t just “stop.” One must wean—slowly. Deliberately. And at the risk of clogged ducts and other unpleasantries).

In planning our return, we had to limit how long I’d be away from my kid to maintain my sanity and general health. Lauryn was planning to be in Vegas with her van already, so why shouldn’t I bust out there for 16 hours and drag a series of borrowed Yeti coolers and a small army of pumping equipment up a route?.

Back to the base of Black Magic: After about an hour-long approach, it’s 10 a.m., and time to start climbing if I want to make my return flight. We flip a coin; it’s a tradition we’ve had for as long as I can remember. One person is heads, the other tails. Heads always leads the first pitch, and we swap leads after that. Today I am heads, and I pray the coin lands on tails. Neither of us have ever backed away from what the coin gods rule, and I don’t want to start now.

It lands on heads. My stomach flutters. I chalk up and wonder how I’ll feel once I’m up there, the wall in shadow and looking large and ominous. I expect the fear; I have children now. Death isn’t a viable option, and broken feet or hands sound even more inconvenient. The days of dislocated appendages because of a blown piece are over. Instead I have entered the era of the spreadsheet delineating every single household and parental responsibility between myself and my husband. The pressure of self-preservation weighs on me with a new intensity.

But what I’m still trepidatious about, despite the many things I had to put in place to make this trip happen, is how I’ll manage to pump and store the breast milk I’m producing on the climb. “The production” happens in real time, all the time, and must be expressed on the hour, every three hours. No matter where I am, the show must go on. The day could end in an epic story and bragging rights, or with mastitis and a trip to the hospital.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to assess whether my lead head has withstood the last few years away from climbing. The all-encompassing, beautiful, horrifying, sanity-sucking, life-giving vortex of having children has taken me away from the sport. But I’m slowly finding my way back.

Despite the hour, the sun is barely visible this far into the canyon. I pull onto the wall and make my first few moves on the cool sandstone. My hands naturally scale the first few holds. Without thinking, I’m halfway up the pitch. It feels as if motherhood has set me free, like it has ignited a superpower. Mere months ago, I grew a baby and then pushed it out of my body over 28 excruciating hours. Now I feel more powerful than ever. I note the odd sense of being completely free from fear, like I could climb the entire route with minimal gear and in record time.

Slowly, though, nervousness creeps in. Two or three shaky gear placements later, I feel a blinding spotlight on the fragility and mortality of it all. I know I will one day die, of course, and I hope it’s not today. I’d venture that this occurs to most of us on multipitch trad routes like this (isn’t it why we’re drawn to the sport?). I climb through a growing nausea and build an anchor at the top of pitch one. I quell the fear with a few deep breaths and an old mantra: Why be alive if we can’t experience life? 

These last few years, I’ve been reflecting on my own parents—I don’t remember them doing much for themselves. I don’t remember them going on trips, or hanging out with friends, or pursuing passions. If they did these things, I didn’t hear about them. That’s in line with the societal assumption that once you have a child, your whole life narrows to being just … mom.

I love being a mom, but it’s also healthy and wonderful to continue to develop the other parts of myself, too. The climber and adventurer in me. The professional, working person in me. The violist and academic and friend and cyclist and returning springboard diver and who knows what else still to be discovered in me. My growth as a human only makes me a better parent, and ultimately shows my kids that their mom is a full, three-dimensional person who has hopes and dreams of her own.

I near the top of the third pitch and inevitably, my phone’s alarm breaks the sobering silence. Its persistent, dull ring (and my engorged boobs) are telling me it’s time to hook up to the plastic vacuum pump with a mechanical whizz and try to get comfortable in a hanging belay while it sucks fluid out of my body so my eight month old at home can grow up knowing that his mom did indeed make the adequate sacrifices.

I feel insane, trying to claw back my identity as an adventure trad climber at the same time as being a mom to a small person who survives only on what my body produces. But here we are.

Four hundred feet off the deck, I set an anchor and belay Lauryn to meet me. I clip my backpack in front of me to carefully unzip it, and search for the soft cooler bag with a portable breast pump with batteries, flanges, tubes, milk bottles, milk storage bags, and ice packs.

I precariously balance the pump atop my climbing bag and begin the whole absurd setup for the fourth time today—but for the first time on the wall. What might have felt vulnerable, obscene, or at least highly inconvenient starts to feel wondrous and hilarious. Lauryn is next to me, fishing out her phone to document this against-all-odds moment, while the party on the climb next to us yells down and asks if we’re okay. “Yes!” I yell up. “Just pumping!” One of the climbers yells back “that’s awesome!” before continuing their journey upwards.

I begin to understand that the rest of my climbing career—and my life—will probably look something like this. I know it won’t always be a balance of milk bottles 400 feet up a wall, but it will be a balance of identities, hopes, and fears.

At the end of the day, the schlepping of all the shit, the anxiety, the 4 a.m. approach just so I could get home in time for the night feed—all of it let me explore my new confluence of identities. Me and my over-zealous cam selection, uncalloused hands, and sore feet climbed 580 feet of middling sandstone with one of my closest friends, feeling something between fear and freedom. It was absolutely glorious.

But perhaps the best part of it all was to come home that night, hug my kids, and answer the question my three-year-old daughter asked me when I walked in: “What mountain did you climb today, Mama?”

The post Pumping Milk on a Hanging Belay: The Non-traditional Trad Mom appeared first on Climbing.