I first took up climbing when I was growing up on the island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean and continued to climb when I fell pregnant with my son Arthur, who was born in December. After about four months I stopped leading the kind of climbs where you can take bigger falls but I was still climbing until I was eight months pregnant.
The baby was at his most relaxed when I was climbing – I think it’s because I struggle to relax when I’m doing nothing so he can feel it. I felt like he was fine if I was fine. It’s what your body is used to. I would have hated to have been sitting on my ass for nine months – that would’ve been really horrible.
I also think continuing to climb made my pregnancy easier. I maintained an activity I enjoyed and I feel like the baby liked it when I climbed. When me and my husband [fellow climber James Pearson] were in Japan, we heard a word which translates as ‘education in the belly’ and the idea of that seems real. Before I was pregnant, I didn’t realise there was so much going on before the baby is born but now it’s obvious.
I had to drop the level of climbing as my bump got bigger because the weight meant I couldn’t use my abs – I couldn’t tense the muscles. Also, because the bump was in front, I couldn’t lift my legs as high because there was something in the way.
In the last 15 days before Arthur was born I had lots of contractions so I had to calm down and not really do anything and I was unbearable even to myself.
I’m not back to my normal weight yet but suddenly I have freedom of movement again. I’ve started to work a little bit with weights for my upper body but I can’t work on my abs until they are back together. I have to take at least one month off.
I used to think that if James and I died together while climbing, maybe that’s fine, but the birth of Arthur has changed my attitude a bit as we don’t want to leave an orphan. If we found ourselves in a situation where we both killed ourselves, we would be super guilty of abandoning him. In the type of climbing we do, the accident would normally be limited to just one of us. Ideally, we don’t die and that’s fine.
I’m less of a risk taker than James but our climbing has always been about controlling risk and we never think that we are taking reckless risks. I will go back to what I was doing because I don’t feel like I was taking the risk of dying. In the 21st century, we really push against risk and avoiding all risk means you avoid some of the joys of life.
Climbing Beyond: The World’s Greatest Rock Climbing Adventures by James Pearson and Caroline Ciavaldini is published by Aurum Press at £25.
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