Going out for a walk after becoming a mother is complicated. If you are, as so many women have been over the centuries, trying to walk and mother at the same time, it might not be possible to walk at all. For every joyous walk of stop-start discovery there will have been innumerable non-walks where you didn’t even manage a hundred yards, or even out of the front door.
Supposing your children are amenable to the day’s plans, you must still demonstrate an aptitude for logistics that would qualify you for the army. Have you got the bag? Is it filled with everything you are going to or might possibly need? Have you got the nappies, wet wipes, nappy bags, spare clothes in triplicate, hats in duplicate, sun cream, drinks, snacks, alcohol gel, and more snacks (small people absolutely march on their stomachs). If you’re very lucky you’ll have remembered to pack your own hat, drink and snacks, but more likely than not there was no time and you’ll have to make do with the half packet of crisps the children leave discarded.
And then there’s the carrying. You’ve managed to usher the children out of the door and you’re a good distance along the modest route you’ve planned when someone says, ‘I want a carry.’ So, up they go onto your shoulders, the same shoulders that are loaded with the overstuffed bag that could see you through a nuclear winter, now graced with an additional ten or twenty kilos of child. Or you use your hip, sticking one out as a temporary seat, at least until the support arm gives out. Then, muscles burning, you have to decide whether to cut your losses and turn around, or gamble that your offspring’s ability to put one foot in front of the other will return before your back gives way. More often than not, you turn around.
During both of my pregnancies I tried to keep walking, even as my body changed utterly, when it behaved in ways that were completely alien. Growing a baby felt to me like handing control of my body to someone else – who, quite, I was never sure, but it certainly was not me. Bits leaked without warning, body parts changed position and shape of their own volition, and as my babies grew inside me it became increasingly obvious that I was never, ever, alone. The only part of myself that remained truly mine was my mind, and that was under assault from a cocktail of neurochemicals and social pressures. During my first pregnancy I continued mountain climbing, holding onto my deepest love for as long as I could, and summiting my final pre-motherhood Munro some way into my third trimester. With my second baby it was much harder to keep walking because I had a toddler in tow who sometimes needed to be slung on my shoulders, and long before my due date I’d had enough of carrying children inside and outside my body. For the last month or so before my daughter was born, I just gave up.
Worse was to come, though, for both pregnancies. I carried inside myself, along with each of my children, almost all the known risk factors for postnatal depression. As my mental health gradually deteriorated after both deliveries my grief at the loss of who I had been before turned into despair. I could not come to terms at all with the sudden and total severing of the connection between who I had been and who I was now: between the adventurous walker, at home in the mountains, and the inadequate mother for whom every minor domestic challenge had become terrifying. I was fortunate to find treatment and support before I could put into action my plans to end my despair: along with therapy and help acquiring parenting skills I was paired with a volunteer who happened to love going for walks. On these walks I learned to talk about what I was feeling, and I learned that I would be listened to without judgement. These walks together were trifles in distance and difficulty compared with what I had been used to, but they came to be essential to my well-being. It was on these walks that I started to find my way back to myself.
Until I had children I had no idea how difficult it could be just to leave the house for a walk, and so in the years that followed the arrival of my two children, as I started to piece my shattered sense of self back together, I wanted to see how other women who loved walking, past and present, had navigated the transition into motherhood, what routes and paths they found back to themselves. It seemed natural to me to explore this topic on foot, and I was honoured to find women who wanted to walk with me. It quickly became clear that each time I had set off with a child in a buggy or strapped to my body, or just for an afternoon’s freedom from the endless demands of little people, I had been walking on the same path as numberless women who had mothered and walked and struggled and yearned and tried to find their way forward. Learning this helped me to start reconciling what I had become with who I thought I had been; I hope that weaving that knowledge into Pathfinding will help others who might be struggling to find their way.
Pathfinding: On Walking, Motherhood and Freedom by Kerri Andrews (Elliott & Thompson) is out now in hardback, £16.99. https://bit.ly/3O4ZPlw
KERRI ANDREWS is a writer, editor, teacher and enthusiastic walker. Her latest book is Pathfinding: On Walking, Motherhood and Freedom (Elliott & Thompson). She is also the author of Wanderers: A History of Women’s Walking, and the editor of Way Makers. She is a keen walker in the Scottish hills (she has climbed 126 of the Munros) and in the Tweed valley, where she lives. Kerri also teaches creative writing, and has previously worked as an academic at Edge Hill University and the University of Strathclyde. She is the mother of two small and energetic children, whom she is sometimes successful in persuading to go for a walk.
