When You Get Yourself Back

When Kirk and I discussed having more children in the late 2000s, I knew I’d be giving up a lot. Having been through it with my oldest and finding hiking when he was an infant, I felt I could handle it. He had hiked everywhere with me and was my hiking partner the year we decided to go for it. But as all well-laid plans go, they never go quite how you thought they would.

I was coming off a high. I built TrailCooking, was featured in Backpacker Magazine, gave talks in REI locations, and attended trail festivals as a speaker. I was hiking 20-mile days and working out in the gym. Life was good. I was at the lowest weight I had been since college. It was the summer of 2009.

I thought I would have a child, and we’d be on the trails with him on my shoulders. And yes, I did the first year with Walker.

(On the AT, in Great Smoky National Park, Walker was 6 months old, in fall of 2010.)

Like normalizing taking babies into the mountains, off we went. Maybe lunch was at an alpine lake, or along a creek. That first year was also a high, and I was loving it.

Then we had another baby.

Those three years to have those two children took a toll on me. I wasn’t allowed to work out during pregnancy, and bouncing back wasn’t easy. I had severe postpartum depression with my last child, which took me a year to climb back out of. Then, as I was finally approaching normalcy, our youngest was diagnosed with severe life-threatening allergies (Alistaire is who I wrote Hiking Free for).

I kept going out, though. My 20-mile day hikes became 3.5-mile hikes on trails I knew had a lot of hikers in case anything happened, maybe a quick loop to Shadow Lake at Mount Rainier or around Naches Peak. I was constantly on edge, running with anxiety: “What do I do if he has an allergic reaction while I am out here?” I carried 4 Epi Pen Jr’s on me. My oldest was a teen, and he knew the drill – that if anything happened, I’d run with the baby, and he’d walk out with the toddler. It wasn’t fair to him, but he took it well.

And then it DID happen. He ate something he reacted to, sitting at the end of the road by Mt. St. Helens. Thankfully, it was a minor reaction. That day, I learned he couldn’t eat yellow peas (which were in a peanut butter-like spread).

And with that, I did change. We started hiking more urban trails and rail to trails. I was struggling to keep writing TrailCooking and trying to stay relevant. Writing articles and posts about the outdoors is hard when you don’t feel wildernessy.

And I Met The Jerks:

Being a female in the outdoors industry is hard enough. Men don’t take you seriously; they assume you don’t know what you are talking about, even if you are an expert. I could deal with that; I had a hard shell about it for years.

But I couldn’t take the men who sent me emails saying that my talking about hiking with my children bored them and that I needed to stay in my lane. I shouldn’t talk about my jogging stroller I took them in, nor the accessories I had found to make hiking easier with 2 under 2.

The first time I got an email, it was crushing to my inner self. I was months out of feeling awesome again; the PPD had been so hard to function under. I was feeling almost back to where I wanted to be. And it felt like I was being kicked over.

WHAT YOU SAY MATTERS. Or as my Mama said, “If you don’t have anything positive to say, shut your pie-hole.” Oh wait, that would be me saying it, but you get the point.

It was the same as a Drama Lama on Facebook or a forum announcing they were leaving and listing everything they hated on the way out. If what I wrote was boring, then you know what? Don’t read it. The blog was a lifeline to me, to get back to my new normal.

But it affected me sharply. I lost nearly all desire to continue writing TrailCooking. I kept it alive only because an inner voice told me to keep at it, that someday it would be different. I mostly wrote about recipes and homesteading on my other sites, where my readers were primarily women who supported me with praise.

I felt like every time I wrote about my children, there would be a man out there ready to tell me I was boring him, as if I wasn’t allowed to have a family visible to them. This was weird because on the trail, I saw so many women with young kids. We are out there but mostly ignored.

Over the years, as my boys grew up, I wrote less about them. I started hiking sometimes without them, finding adult hiking partners once again. I don’t feature my children often because I respect their privacy. Once they are over 5, they deserve not to live a public life.

I mention them occasionally, and rarely are they on Instagram photos. But at 12 and 14, they are teens. It’s Mom’s hobby, so they put up with me and go on hikes to humor me.

But the pandemic was good for me. It fueled me back into TrailCooking. I found myself as the boys approached teenhood. I had free time again, where I wasn’t consumed by kids all day. Aging also meant I wasn’t as scared by Alistaire’s food allergies. Now he was old enough to tell me if things were wrong. He could communicate.

Being on the trail (and for me, “real” trails, those in the mountains and the deep forest meant I had things to write about. I started using my gear once again. I slowly found myself once again and remembered who I was not that long ago.

It’s a weird trip to think I have been writing this blog on the TrailCooking website since 2007, and before that on Freezer Bag Cooking, it dates back to around 2003. Much of the older content doesn’t exist anymore due to a deep hack, but to know that I didn’t give up in the days of being bogged down, I am forever glad I listened to my mind, telling me not to give up, that I’ve found my way back. Every hike now, I feel excited to write about it – and every recipe I create is exciting again.

Here is too many more miles and years of talking about the outdoors and ignoring the haters. It’s been great being back these past few years.

~Sarah