By Ashlee Gadd
@ashleegadd

Brett and I are standing in the doorway of our vacation condo, listening to my dad give directions in classic dad form: take highway 19, turn left at the stop sign, go 15 miles, turn right at the gas station, then stay on the bumpy road for about three minutes.

“You can’t miss it,” he says confidently.

An hour later, with some much-needed help from my GPS app, we park our rental car at the top of Pololū Valley Lookout. As we make our way toward the trailhead, we notice a small group of people congregating next to a pop-up tent. A man and two women who look to be around my parent’s age—mid-60s or so—sit underneath the canopy in nylon folding chairs. Other tourists approach the tent alongside us, but none of us seem to know what we are supposed to do.

Once we get closer, the man gets up from his folding chair. He doesn’t have a badge, or a uniform, or even a lanyard. Regardless, he seems to be in charge.

“Is this your first time here?” he asks the crowd.

Most of us nod our heads with the exception of a group of six 20-somethings, who say they were just here a month ago. He waves them along with some form of authority and then asks the rest of us to huddle closer.

“Listen up, please,” he starts, eyes panning the group. “This is a very steep hike. We’ve had nine helicopter rescues in the past two months.”

He goes on to detail the injuries—tales of people falling, slipping, breaking bones, twisting ankles. He warns us of prior hikers who have gone down and not been able to climb back up.

“There’s no cell service down there,” he warns, “So if you get hurt, someone from your party needs to run back up here.”

He motions toward the top of the tent, where emergency phone numbers have been written in sharpie marker along the border, and points to a first-aid kit, should we need it.

“Save your water for the way up,” he says more than once. “We don’t medevac people out of here for dehydration.”

He then tells us that helicopter rescues cost the county $12,000—which immediately impacts the local taxpayers. I read between the lines: will you dumb dumb tourists stop coming in here and getting hurt?

The more he talks, the more anxious I feel. While I’m not an exercise freak by any means, I like to think I’m in relatively good shape. I can carry my 35-pound daughter on my hip no problem, and I do yoga multiple times a week. Suddenly, though, I am filled with doubt.

Can I actually do this hike?
What if I fall?
Am I going to get hurt?

The man in the folding chair appears to be warning us—in a dozen different ways—that severe danger lies ahead. Brett and I look at each other and shrug. We’ve already come this far. We thank him for the advice, promise we’ll be careful, and start walking down the trail.

***

The year is 2008. We are newly married and still settling into Sacramento, the city we now call home. One day my husband reconnects with a friend from high school, who promptly invites us to a dinner party with other couples. With this one gesture, she offers us something we don’t even know we need: married friends.

This is where I meet—and instantly become enamored with—a group of women who are all about four years older than me. I instinctively fawn over them like a tween at a Taylor Swift concert. These women are in established careers, wearing grown-up clothes in their grown-up houses doing grown-up things like hosting dinner parties with wine. Meanwhile, I am fresh out of college, a little lost, not sure what I am doing with my life. I feel like a kid who’s been granted access to the adult table, a privilege I don’t take lightly.

“Do you run?” one of them asks me during dinner.

I say yes, lying through my teeth, desperate to ace this pop-up test, to do whatever it takes to spend more time with these cool, sophisticated women. Despite the fact that I do not even own a pair of running shoes and haven’t run a mile since high school cheer practice, I say, “Yes, definitely, I’d love to run a relay marathon with you all in December!”

They welcome me into the fold and invite me to join their Bible study. I say yes to every single invitation, pinching myself over and over again that I am suddenly part of this posse, that my name has been added to the group text.

Before long, they all start getting pregnant.

Baby shower season consumes my calendar for what feels like two years straight. Every six months, someone else shows up to dinner or Bible study with a sly smile and a pregnancy announcement. We squeal with glee, clap our hands, throw our arms around the newest one to wear the title of Mother.

I desperately want what they have. I am also 22, then 23 years old—still learning how to be a wife, still learning how to be a grown-up that doesn’t burn dinner. So I watch from the sidelines as they all move into the next chapter of life without me. I listen dutifully, tucking everything they say into the file cabinets of my mind. What to register for. How to sleep train. Breastfeeding and swaddling and baby-proofing tips. All of a sudden, these women—who I now call friends—are speaking a language I do not yet speak. Instead, I sit on the couch smiling, always smiling, studying their bellies and dissecting their conversations like a detective looking for clues.

I want them to know how much I care, how much I don’t want to be left behind, how desperately I want to be part of this same club someday.

So I ask questions about baby carriers and birth plans. Pacifiers and stretch marks and postpartum sex. What I’m really asking, though, is: how does this whole motherhood thing work? What exactly do I need to know? How will becoming a mother change my life?

***

A year after I graduated college, I started a blog. I still did not know what I wanted to be when I grew up, but I knew I loved to write.

So I wrote about marriage. I wrote about my hopes and dreams. I wrote story after story from the viewpoint of a young twenty-something who had grown up in a very privileged bubble and knew nothing about the world. I wrote all kinds of musings about life—despite my significant lack of life experience.

And in every story I wrote, I closed the loop. I tied up each ending with a neat little satin bow. I put my takeaways on a silver platter, and handed them to the reader with a garnish on the side.

“Write what you know,” the blogging experts advised.

Perfect, I thought to myself.

I never ran out of things to write.

Because I knew so, so much.

***

I slip twice right away, not for carelessness or ineptitude, but simply because my Nike running shoes have zero grip on the bottom. The rocks are slick, coated with dust. As the man in the folding chair promised, the trail is steep. I might as well be wearing roller skates the way my shoes keep sliding in the dirt.

“Here, I’ll go in front of you,” Brett says, maneuvering his body in front of me.

“Are you going to catch me if I fall?” I joke, “and they say chivalry is dead.”

We make our way down, slowly, carefully, stopping to take pictures along the way. At one of the first viewpoints, there’s a big sign with an illustration of a person slipping off a cliff.

! Warning !

Hazardous Cliff! The ground may break off without warning and you could be seriously injured or killed. Stay back from the edge.

I snap a photo of the view directly behind the sign, being careful not to look down or step too close to the edge. Brett jokingly reminds me we still don’t have a life insurance policy on me.

As we continue walking down, we cross paths with a few other people walking up. We smile and nod at each other, coming and going, politely stepping to the side to let each other pass. I am tempted to ask, “How much further? Anything we should know?”

I bite my tongue in an effort to embrace the mystery. Everyone climbing back up looks tired, but all of their limbs remain intact. I take this as a good sign, and keep going.

***

Kara is the first to become a mother. We joke that her daughter Tyler will be the guinea pig, the group test baby. A meal train is promptly set up, which is perhaps the first rule I learn about motherhood: when someone has a baby, bring them food. Always.

On my assigned meal night, I drive to Kara’s little bungalow in East Sacramento with a pasta dish in the front seat. I walk up to the door with a hot container in one hand, a bag of salad and dessert in the other. I ring the doorbell and wait.

After a minute, Kara flings open the door wearing shorts and a sports bra, with a dish towel haphazardly tucked inside.

“Oh my gosh, thank you so much for dinner, sorry I am leaking everywhere!” she says apologetically.

This is before I know anything about breastfeeding, about letdowns, about any of the many shocking things that can happen to a woman’s body post birth. This is before I have any real life friends who are moms, before I have any perception of what motherhood is like apart from what I’ve seen on TV.

Let me be clear: my friend Kara is, objectively, a total knockout. Killer smile, honey blond hair, bright blue eyes, and the arms of a Pilates instructor. If anyone can pull off a sports bra stuffed with a dish towel, it’s her.

And yet—I am still a tad alarmed at the sight in front of me.

I smile at her nonetheless, take a mental picture and add it to the growing filing cabinet in my brain. I place food in her hands and come inside to hold the baby, per her request. Twenty minutes later I get back in my car and try to wrap my head around the fact that I could someday answer the door with a dish towel shoved in my bra.

***

If you were to ask me how I have grown as a writer since I first started that blog fourteen years ago, I would tell you this:

I used to write answers. Now, I ask questions.

Back then, I never put a single word on paper until I had the ending mapped out in my head. This was real advice I used to give aspiring writers: don’t begin writing a story until you know how it ends.

Today I would tell you confidently: that is terrible advice.

Harrison Scott Key says making art is a combination of 5 percent talent and 95 percent curiosity. That’s another key difference between my past writer self and my current writer self. Once upon a time, I considered curiosity a weakness.

Today, though, I would tell any writer—and any mother—that curiosity is a strength.

***

When we get to the bottom of the trail, we are spit out into a forest of sorts. The air instantly feels eight degrees cooler, a profound relief. Warm black sand melts under our toes, fluffy white clouds suspend in the sky like marshmallow chandeliers. We write our initials in the sand, take a few swigs of water, and sit on a piece of driftwood to eat granola bars. Both of us enjoy a few moments of silence, gulping the ocean air and listening to the waves.

I walk to the edge of the crystal blue water and look out at the vastness, feeling tiny and insignificant in the very best way.

***

On May 7, 2012, I arrive at the hospital well-read, well-studied, my inner filing cabinet bursting with notes.

A slippery baby is placed on my chest just before noon, and I cry like I’ve never cried before.

My friends come to visit. The ones who have gone before me, the same ones I’ve been studying for years. They sit on the edge of my hospital bed and marvel at the teeny body in my arms. I am swollen head to toe from the c-section, a steady stream of fluids still coursing through my veins. My feet are 3x bigger than they normally are and my cheeks look like a chipmunk’s. My friends tell me I look beautiful, a very kind lie.

Lesley arrives with a giant ziplock bag of homemade granola.

“Breastfeeding made me SO hungry,” she tells me, placing the bag in my hands. “This was my favorite thing to snack on in the middle of the night.”

A last minute tip I file away. I can’t picture myself eating granola at 3 a.m. but within a week, I am doing just that.

My friends leave after an hour. I look down at the baby sleeping on my chest, my heart as swollen as my feet, as I try to reconcile the two conflicting thoughts swirling in my head.

I am as prepared as I can possibly be.

And, also—

I know nothing.

***

An old babysitter of mine texts me roughly every six months. She loves reading my work. She desperately wants to be a mother someday.

“I can’t wait to revisit these stories in the future with a whole new lens,” she tells me.

I am flattered and humbled by her words. And yet, sometimes when I hear from the not-yet mothers, I’m worried I have somehow positioned myself as the man in the nylon chair—the person at the top of the hike with some sense of authority, the mother who can adequately prepare and warn you about what’s to come.

But how can I possibly warn you of what motherhood entails? How can I possibly articulate how dangerous this is, to crack your heart open this much? To love this deeply? How can I qualify the risks? The joys? The deliriousness and heartache of it all?

I’ve been a mother for over a decade and I know less now than I did in the beginning. I don’t think that’s what the not-yet mothers want to hear, but it’s the truest thing I can offer.

No book can prepare you, no essay—not even this one—can tell you what you need to know. If you saw me at the top of the motherhood trailhead, I would simply tell you this: there are hazards and beautiful views everywhere. Don’t forget to hydrate. Don’t forget to rely on the One who offers to catch you if you fall.

Then, I’d hand you a bag of granola and a dish towel. And I’d whisper, “Stay curious,” as you put on a brave face and head down the trail.

Ashlee Gadd is a wife, mother of three, believer, and the founder of Coffee + Crumbs. When she's not working or vacuuming Cheerios out of the carpet, she loves making friends on the Internet, eating cereal for dinner, and rearranging bookshelves. Her book, Create Anyway: the Joy of Pursuing Creativity in the Margins of Motherhood, is available wherever books are sold. You can also keep up with her work at Substack.