As Seen From Above

This past weekend, after a several year hiatus, mainly attributed to the pregnancy/birth of our first child, my husband decided to go downhill mountain biking.

For those of you formerly familiar with the sport (as I thought I was), mountain biking has evolved. In the last few years, it has gone from a quiet trip through the woods on a barely maintained gravel path requiring merely a set of thicker tires to an extreme sport that demands full body armor, a helmet with face mask and a piece of equipment that more accurately resembles a Flinstone-powered monster truck (think 28 inch studded tires, full shocks, and disk brakes). The activity is also accomplished on trails with man-made high bank turns, rollers, jumps, and rock and log “features” all aimed at maximizing the aerial potential of the experience.

The plan was to make this a family outing during which our fifteen-month-old daughter and I would hike to the top of the chairlift and meet Joe after one of his many downhill runs. This was also part of my not-so-secret plan to check that he and the bike (which we had rented without damage protection even after it had been offered to us by two separate sales associates) were still in one piece.

After a few pictures and hugging goodbye in a mock scene from the Titanic's departure, we parted ways. Joe riding up the chairlift while Sophie (dangling contentedly from a backpack) and I headed up the hiking trail.

Two things surprised me in the first fifteen minutes of our venture. First, we were the only duo hiking up (everyone else came bouncing down the steep gravel trail with a walking stick in hand to slow their decent and a lift ticket dangling from their necks). Second, we were directly under the chairlift and so immediately subject to an inordinate amount of easily audible heckling erupting from above.

Seeing as an important part of extreme sports involves being watched in the act (think of the TV network and vast number of DVDs and online content spawned by the action sports industry) I wondered why the bikers themselves had been spared this particular (in) dignity (depending on your point of view).

Instead, by some trick of trail (in) design (again depending on your view point), it was my daughter and I on display as chair after chair of onlookers ogled at our relatively slow, uphill ascent.

Their comments ranged from cheers and impressed encouragement (one fully packed lift of twenty-something males decked out in extreme-ride regalia shouted down, “Best time on the mountain,” when they realized that my daughter was comfortably sacked out for our upward journey) to outright jeers (another similarly loaded lift yelled simply, “That has got to suck”).

Our presence also sparked sweet reminisces that were not necessarily intended for our ears. One father began to narrate a tale to his teenage daughter and son about when they were young enough to be carried in packs. (Because it was only the three of them, I couldn't help but wonder about what else this man might have been missing in watching us, although maybe his spouse was somewhere off on her bike as was my own.)

Perhaps because I was hefting an thirty extra pounds, the exact weight I gained during the first forty weeks of carrying our daughter, it struck me that this experience was amazingly like pregnancy. Almost everyone who passed (this time from above) had something to say about our presence. I couldn't help but be transported back to walking the halls at work amidst such innumerable comments, some welcomed (Oh, this is the best time of your life) to others from whom I wanted to turn and run yet could only slowly waddle (Wow, you're as big as a house. Are you past due?). It brought back that same mix of joyful anxiety of the highly anticipated unknown combined with just plain anxiety and a deep desire to hide from the tide of judgment that seemed to reign at every turn.

When a man and his son stopped to ask how far I intended to “make it,” it was all I could do to grit my teeth and smile politely as I had so many times before. (He had after all stopped to take our picture.) Yet, when he went on to tell me that he had five kids now grown whom he expected would someday carry him, I had little trouble picturing them as his pallbearers. What is it exactly about the act of being with child that seems to grant everyone cart blanch to comment on your life and its eminent trajectory?

While I was immensely enjoying our hike (as I had our pregnancy), I was relieved when the trail finally dropped into the woods after about an hour. In many ways, this hike, like pregnancy, was an invitation for me to finally and appropriately love my body for what it could do for us in this world: carry us to new heights (literally in this case) and afford us an experience we could not have had otherwise.

I found this a welcome interruption to the lifetime I've spent bemoaning myself for an unsightly stretch mark or a stubborn piece of flesh that does not hang the way I want it to in a bikini. Or in a less superficial way (infinitely truer and more important), a lifetime of having to constantly prove myself because I am a woman (and somehow lesser than the guys).

It is only in becoming a mother that I've been able to escape some of that constant self worth questioning, that general hatred of my too fat, too awkward, too womanly body, which (as trivial as it sounds) becomes hard to separate from self. I love the strength motherhood has given me to call back at those hecklers (oh boys, too bad you'll never know what you are missing).

Yet, the truth of the mater is the realization comes easier in private than in public, and its relatively easy to fall back into my old way of thinking, especially when surrounded by judgment so easily sprouting from other's lips.

When we finally came into view of the chairlift again, this time (thankfully) it was my husband calling to us as he got off the lift. Somehow, without the assistance of our cell phones, we had arrived on top of the mountain at the very same time (although neither of us questioned who had had the harder journey). We joked together about how must be training to enter the family version of the Amazing Race, the show that guarantees any couple the thrill of a lifetime in circumscribing the globe (although they may no longer be speaking to one another at the end of it.)

While something tells me that these scenes would indeed make for good TV(especially when it comes to finding a suitable spot above 10,000 feet for a diaper change), I don't think I would take Bruckhiemer's call. Too much simply gets missed as a spectator sport.