A Benediction
By: Mary Ryan Karnes Brown
Tags: Birth, Skiing, Motherhood

People shouldn’t ski. Mountains are too steep, too jagged, too riddled with tree wells and unknown contours, to serve as recreational spaces. Even outfitted with ski lifts and manned by burly ski patrol officials, they remain ancient and hungry. Skiing is laborious, expensive play: it requires specialty gear and heavy boots that transform the human gait into a cyborg’s sashay. It requires a willingness to look ridiculous before you even begin. Most of all, skiing — with its speed and velocity and poky poles — defies the reptilian, survival-obsessed brain.

It is my belief that more people should die skiing than actually do. The National Ski Areas Association reports that, over the past decade, only 40.6 people on average have died per year in skiing or snowboard-related accidents. Such a fatality rate means that you, were you to suit up and hop on a ski lift today, would only have a .78 in 1 million chance of perishing on the slopes. I find these minuscule odds remarkable: for all the turbulence and chaos of skiing, the chances of actual death are a little laughable. We are more likely to die in car crashes, mass shootings, or childbirth.

I was 21 years old when I took my first ski lesson at a resort called Steamboat Springs, a place that my skiing friends consider a Mecca for winter sports novices like me. The golden-haired instructor used the word ‘y’all’ to address me and my Mississippi family. I asked her if she, too, was from the South.

“No,” she said, “But ‘y’all’ is a better gender-neutral pronoun than ‘folks.’”

Another piece of sage advice from our ski instructor: “If you want to stop, if you want to slow down, cross your skis like this,” she said as she gave a breezy demonstration. “We call it a pizza. You make a pizza with your skis.”

On that first day I remember, as the sun hit the snow and burned my eyes, a longing to go back to the sauna in the lodge we were renting, undressed and away from the mountain. Instead I tried a few runs and fell several times after attempting to ‘pizza’ my skis when it all got too fast and terrifying. I hated skiing. I hated the sun, the snow, the red-faced instructors skiing backwards down the bunny slopes, and the idea that any of this should be considered the stuff of vacations. Of course, this is a story where I grow to love the thing I fear.

Small children do well to ski. They have low centers of gravity and underdeveloped senses of fear. What is a mountain — what is a concussion — when you’ve only just learned how to use a toilet? Three- and four-year-olds on skis the size of French loaves laughed as they glided down the slopes. They held hands on the way down, giggling and moving their legs in sync. Their instructor, a man-boy with a bandana around his neck, encouraged his cadre of little dudes with a rhythmic stream of words like rad, gnar, and shred. I believe I was witnessing pure joy, joy for everyone involved, and I wanted some.

I got better at skiing, but not after resisting every hill, crossing one ski over the other in pitiful attempts to ‘pizza’ all the way down. By the end of the second day, my body ached from all the resisting I had done: clenching my jaws and fists, bracing and jerking backward away from the bottom of the slope, knocking my knees together in pursuit of the pizza stance, which I believed might save me from gravity if I only could cross my skis emphatically enough. The next morning, our third day of skiing, I decided to watch the small, fearless children more closely, to see how to imitate and maybe even steal their joy. Here’s what I noticed: they leaned forward. Shoulders over hips. Their skis were parallel. They never pizza-ed. They invited gravity in. I never saw one of them fall.

So that was that: I had to make the anti-reptilian, death-obsessed decision to give in to the mountain. I had to let the snow be snow, the rocks be rocks, and the skis be skis. Energy was only moving in one direction: down towards the bottom. I had to follow it. I did follow it, and, for the first time since I had arrived in Steamboat, I made it to the bottom of a green slope without falling. It was fast. I was afraid, and I was having fun.

Since then, I’ve been lucky enough to go skiing two other times: once in Whitefish, Montana, and once at Wolf Creek Resort in Colorado. I went on the Wolf Creek trip in February 2020 — just before the coronavirus changed everything — with the man who, unbeknownst to either of us, would become the father of my baby and my husband — yes, in that order — over the course of the next year.

In Wolf Creek, he and I found ourselves on a trail far too advanced for our skill level, a trail specifically groomed with bumps designed to increase speed. We had no choice but to descend, and I remember laughing. I remember falling. I remember I wasn’t afraid.

When we got back home to Mississippi, we spent the spring and summer wondering when the pandemic would end. We watched The Sopranos for the first time. We got pregnant. I told him while he was brushing his teeth. His response: “Good, now will you stop peeing on sticks?”

We got married. It was a Friday. We went to apply for a marriage license, learned that the legal process was much easier than we anticipated, bought a dress and donned a suit, and went back to the mayor’s office the next hour, where he married us in the smallest, most beautiful ceremony we could imagine. It cost 36 dollars in cash, exact bills only. “Mary Ryan is a free spirit,” my husband’s friends told him. They didn’t seem too surprised that this is how it all happened.

A month later we got engaged. My husband took me to New Orleans for the night, got down on one knee in Jackson Square, and gave me a ring that will always give me butterflies when I look at it. We ate at Galatoire’s, spent the night at the Roosevelt, and marveled at how quickly life was changing. The next day, at a gender reveal party our families generously threw for us, my husband hit a baseball filled with pink powder, and we found out we would be having a daughter.

Pregnant in late July. Married in late August. Engaged in early October. Daughter due in April. People were concerned but so kind. We were afraid but so happy.

Today, I am 37 weeks and 2 days pregnant. Although I don’t feel as if I could go into labor at any moment, I suppose I could. Over the past few weeks, I’ve fallen into habits that would make a ‘free spirit’ wince. I’ve been in an animal-like state, protective of my time and my food and my space. I have an overwhelming urge to stay in or near my house. I have organized and reorganized the nursery, packed the hospital bags, sterilized bottles and pacifiers and breast pump parts. Last night, I practiced swaddling a stuffed bunny over and over.

One day in the next few weeks, I will give birth in one way or another. People have assumed — maybe because I am a yoga instructor and ‘free spirit’ — that I will have an unmedicated or home birth. I applaud the people who choose to do that. I know I won’t do that. I don’t have a birth plan other than drugs, please. I expect birth to be terrifying and unfamiliar, so I have been spending the past nine months trying to surrender my expectations: of marriage, of pregnancy, of birth, and of the postpartum period. I’m riding the lift to the top of the mountain, to the trail that I know will break me, and I’m just sick enough to be excited about it.

I feel like somebody who knows she is about to die. I don’t say this without recognizing the gravity of real, terminal illness and real, terminal morbidity. What I am saying is this: I am about to shed one version of myself and meet somebody new, somebody’s mother. As 2 Corinthians 5:17 tells us, “Old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new.” Something’s got to die for something else to live. These are the rules.

The Corinthian remarks, of course, refer to one’s identity in Christ, something that has also informed the way I’m choosing to see my transition into motherhood. The radical love and work of Jesus, along with therapy, medication, meditation, and the support of the people who love me, have helped me stop hating myself. And now, my self as I know her is going to die. I’ve just gotten to know this version of myself. I’ve just gotten to like her, maybe even forgive and love her. This mind, this body, this set of priorities: they’re passing away. I’m choosing to be fascinated by that, to put my shoulders over my hips and join gravity as it pulls me to the bottom of the slope.

I grew up Presbyterian. I am still Presbyterian. Presbyterians are often associated with austerity, stuffiness, and the hell-horrors of predestination. Somehow, people still consider me a free spirit. At the end of every service in the church I have attended since my own babyhood, the pastor issues a benediction — a blessing, an invocation for divine guidance, in Latin: speak well — for congregants to carry out into the secular world. May the Lord bless you and keep you, that sort of thing. Some congregants lift their hands to accept the benediction. Others, like me, find that gesture a little too showy.

I’d like to issue a benediction, with whatever spiritual authority I have, to the mother I’m going to become. May the Lord bless and keep and make his face to shine: that goes without saying. May the peace which passes understanding fill every empty space. Shantih, shantih, shantih. May you allow love to consume you. May you mother yourself. May you accept pain. May you suspend your disbelief. May you play. May you run toward what is difficult. May you allow help. May you acknowledge defeat. Mother, may you unclench your jaw and let the mountain be the mountain and the skis be the skis. Mother, may you disregard anything I’m saying that no longer applies. All things are becoming new. May you gracefully accept the invitation to change.