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A professional rock climber shares the challenges of maintaining her career after becoming a mother.

In this epistolary memoir, Burhardt shares the emotional challenges of becoming a mother while attempting to retain a sense of her own identity. Prior to becoming pregnant with twins, she was not sure if she wanted to have children. She and her husband had established successful careers as rock climbers and mountain guides, and she was also working on Legado, “the organization I founded with $11,000 and a harebrained idea about combining science, conservation, and climbing.” Through a series of journal entries, Burhardt shares her inner thoughts about the changes she was facing as well as the toll her changing identity was having on her career and marriage. As the author confesses, she prided herself on being different, but the details of domestic life made her feel angry. Facing the daily realities of motherhood, she found herself increasingly resentful of her husband. She believed he wasn’t contributing equally to the household and had a “seemingly incessant desire to tack on time away” to continue to climb for pleasure—something she could no longer do. Furthermore, after the deaths of several fellow rock climbers, the author felt fear as her husband continued to embark on dangerous treks. Burhardt also struggled with her fraught relationship with her mother, and she shows how she had to come to terms with the decisions her mother made regarding motherhood and her marriage to Burhardt’s father. Regarding gender roles, Burhardt questions at whom her anger should be directed: her husband, herself, her father, or society—or some combination thereof. While new parents will find the feelings that Burhardt shares relatable, her negative comments and expressions of anger toward her husband and mother begin to feel repetitive, as the fault in her mind continues to lie largely with others.

Raw, passionate, and stinging.