Adventuring with Mom: Reconciling Our Changing Roles and Finding New Limits

Fair Oak Parkway, a road in my childhood neighbourhood, contained the biggest hill in the world. A never-ending stretch of pavement, it began with a long, slow climb, before turning a corner to reveal the steepest ascent nine-year-old Andrea could imagine.

I used to cycle up this horrific hill with my Mom – she always beat me to the top. As I’d pause panting, she’d assuage my childhood pride, telling me, ‘One day you’ll be beating me up here’.

I didn’t believe her then but she was right. When it came, the victory was sweet.

Adventure Influence

It feels like my Mom has way better adventure stories than I’ll ever have; cross-country motorcycle trips, attempting backflips in back bowls on ski slopes, sketchy abseils in the Rocky Mountains, and waking surrounded by mountain lion tracks after tentless nights.

She forged my thirst for adventure and love for the outdoors at a young age. We were always out hiking, cycling, rafting, fishing, and scrambling.

I learned to ski at the age of three and competed in my first triathlon alongside her at 14. Growing up in the United States, family holidays usually involved road trips to one of the many national parks.

Family adventures from my youth turned into backpacking trips with university friends, summiting 4,000m peaks, skiing bigger mountains, ultra running, rock climbing, and canyoning.

While I found friends with similar interests, my Mom, now in her 70s, remains one of my favourite adventure partners.

Aging Realities

I’ve always felt a little bubble of pride when someone says ‘Wow, your Mom sounds so cool! My parents would NEVER do that’.

It’s true. My Mom is cool. Those comments made it seem so unique to have a parent with whom I could share the same adventures as I do with my similarly-aged friends.

My response to any comments has always been a flip:

‘Well until she tells me “No”, I’m going to continue dragging her outside.’

This ethos applies not only to my Mom but to anyone in my life. It’s easy, as adults, to lose the desire or opportunity to play and push our limits.

That casual and unwavering assumption of her interest and ablility is something my Mom told me she really appreciates. On a recent trip to Costa Rica, she spoke with sadness of many peers whose children dismiss them, because of age and changing capability, and the lost opportunities to explore together.

Despite my unwavering optimism of Mom’s ability to participate in whatever escapade I concoct, we’ve both been hit by the physical realities of her aging.

Osteoarthritis runs in my family, particularly in hands and feet. My great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother all suffer(ed) significant pain and it’s a reality I’ll likely confront one day too.

Though I don’t always want to admit it, this has changed how we think of outdoor adventures. I want to keep pushing her limits but we both know those limits are changing and sometimes our adventures will need to adapt.

Physically this means Mom getting hiking poles and me providing an arm when she’s stepping down giant tree-root steps. It means lowering our expected mileage, slowing our pace, and building in additional rest days. I take feedback and continue to assume Mom will backpack/canyon/sleep in a tent for three weeks straight until she tells me otherwise.

Navigating the Emotions of Role Reversal

But change is hard and taking that feedback, making those adjustments, and providing that support doesn’t always feel easy.

I was privileged to grow up with parents who let me be a kid – safe, secure, and well-cared for. However, this meant that as an adult, it was a revelation that my parents were, in fact, real people too – with feelings, needs, strengths, and weaknesses.

For me, it’s hardest to see someone else change. I experienced this for the first time when my Dad was diagnosed with cancer. Watching the strongest man I knew disintegrate physically over five years was heartbreaking. Almost worse were the emotions we all experienced in coping with this change – anger, denial, frustration, grief – and the fact that my parents, those real people, suddenly needed my support.

After Dad died, it became even clearer that Mom needed me. Not used to the role reversal of child-supporting-parent, I definitely stumbled. And sometimes, selfishly, I’ve resisted the transition. The only outcome of this has been guilt, frustration, and misunderstanding.

Living on different continents, I usually see my Mom once a year. This means physical changes seem to happen quickly with no time for emotional adjustment.

A trip to the Northern Territory in 2022 was a turning point towards acceptance. Mom was moving slower and scrambling with more hesitancy. I had to tamp down my fears and frustrations about these changes, reminding myself that, yes, her arthritis was changing but she was also coming off an ankle injury. I was also so proud of her for completing an overnight trek back-to-back with a gruelling overnight canoe trip in Nitmiluk Gorge.

At the same time, Mom was in her own head – frustrated with her lack of fitness and slow recovery and worried about slowing me down and hampering me from having the ‘adventure I truly wanted’. She was worried about further injury but was also so pleased to be proving to herself she could still do this stuff and keen for the stories to share afterward.

Undiscussed, our internal monologues led to more conflict than we normally experienced traveling together. These are hard topics to broach and it was only as I wrote this article, nearly four years later, that we sat down for a frank discussion about what’s happening inside both of our heads.

In retrospect, that situation could’ve been any friend who’d gotten injured and needed to regain fitness, of which I would’ve been easily supportive. So why did this feel different?

Part of me wants to go back to those days of innocent childhood, where parents take the lead and provide the support. But this is one of the realities of aging we’ve both had to confront. At a certain point, these roles start to flip. I’ve had to learn to provide the same support I would to a friend, because my Mom has become my peer.

Looking back, we both view the Nitmiluk trip as a success, despite any emotional rockiness (pun intended). 

She has to remind herself that she’s done plenty in the past and doesn’t need to prove anything to herself or anyone. She appreciates when people are supportive and considerate, but she really wants to feel like ‘just another person on an adventure’ and not necessarily an ‘old woman on an adventure’.

That was one of her favourite parts of the canoe trip. We kept pace with another young couple around my age who found the trip to be equally challenging. So the four of us worked together to portage canoes and bags, like a team, rather than them just helping us out because Mom was ‘old’.

Getting Out of the Comfort Zone at Any Age

I’m in my mid-30s, so many of my friends are having kids and contemplating the changes to their adventure lifestyle. This made me think about the differences between exploring with an aging parent and exploring with a small child, with a peer trying something new, or a friend returning from injury.

To me, there isn’t much difference at all in how those adventures unfold.

When you go out with someone else, whether or not they’re at your same fitness, experience, or energy level, you have to meet them where they’re at that day.

When it’s someone who needs extra support, getting them across the physical or metaphorical river with dignity and in a way they can celebrate on the other side is important. But it’s also essential to acknowledge that it’s taxing on you, the support person. That it takes adaptation, creativity, effort, enthusiasm, and empathy. That there are a lot of emotions and expectations to manage.

The main difference I see is the emotions. A two-year-old doesn’t notice or care that they’re derailing your 5km hike by sitting down to play with rocks in the dirt. But an adult is acutely aware of changes in their body and how their fitness might impact their compatriots’ experience.

On our recent trip to Costa Rica I pushed Mom into a canyoning expedition – something well out of her comfort zone as someone who suffers from vertigo. She also had an inflammation flare up from her arthritis. This meant I needed to be prepared to provide that extra support to talk her over cliff edges and help her navigate the rocky river and scrambles through the jungle. It was an experience I thought was well worth my effort.

On that trip, Mom told me that what she appreciates most (after my unwavering, bordering on obstinate, conviction of her ability to adventure) is my willingness to give her the support she needs to feel comfortable doing any activity. This led to that challenging discussion about how I both love giving that support, yet struggle with it at the same time. But honestly, seeing her elation after abseiling down the last waterfall was worth everything.

Mom agrees.

She feels strongly about the importance of movement and mental stimulation in promoting her longevity and quality of life, and she does her best to bring those to others as well (ask her about the time she took a random lady from Grandma’s nursing home on a wild ride on a front-loading cargo bike).

My encouragement is for everyone to lean into the messy and uncomfortable emotions, hard conversations, and necessary adjustments that come with exploring with your parents, friends, and children. Be the cheerleader who helps someone close to you get out of their comfort zone and make those moments and memories that are worth everything.

Exploring With Family Teaches Us Many Lessons

• Was I Really That Risky? How Becoming a Parent Changed My Perspective of Risk
• I Grew Up Travelling Around Australia – Here’s The Reality of a Childhood on the Road
• Does becoming a parent mean my adventurous life is about to end?
• Family and Adventure Aren’t Mutually Exclusive: We Are Explorers’s Founder on Bringing Up Adventure Kids