Anything seemed possible if you had ingenuity, money, and tenacity. But the body doesn't play by those rules.

Euripides wrote, “What greater grief can there be for mortals than to see their children dead?” That was more like it.Am I allowed to say “my son”? Was it not a statement of fact that I had given birth on the bathroom floor of the Blue Sky Hotel in Mongolia and watched my son live and die?

It was made clear that sexually transmitted diseases and teen pregnancy were simply not for us: We were to use birth control and go to college and if we somehow got pregnant too soon or with the wrong guy, we were to abort. There was no mention of the possibility that we might want to get pregnant too late.

But the truth is, the ten or twenty minutes I was somebody’s mother were black magic. There is no adventure I would trade them for; there is no place I would rather have seen. -Thanksgiving in Mongolia, The New Yorker, November 18, 2013 Issue

And the truth is, the ten or twenty minutes I was somebody's mother were black magic. There is nothing I would trade them for. There is no place I would rather have seen.

To become a mother, I feared, was to relinquish your status as the protagonist of your own life. Your questions were answered, your freedom was gone, your path would calcify in front of you. And yet it still pulled at me. Being a professional explorer would become largely impossible if I had a child, but having a kid seemed in many ways like the wildest possible trip.