Confession No. 4: Maybe moms shouldn’t climb.

So far these confessions have involved logistics, avoiding the hardest, most obvious question — should moms even climb? As the media invariably asks when a high-profile climbing mom dies, like Alison Hargreaves did on K2 in 1995: is it selfish and wrong to climb if you’re a mother? If you’re a mother and you die climbing, does that make you a bad mother?

Just because non-climbers ask these questions doesn’t mean they’re not legitimate. Undoubtedly, for children, one of life’s worst horrors is having their mother die, for any reason. Maybe a climbing mom’s friends and family find solace knowing she died doing “what she loved,” but that’s scant consolation to her children. Similarly, to a mother, the prospect of dying when her children are young is heartbreaking. This I know firsthand.

When my daughter was born, I nearly died in a statistically safe activity: childbirth. For 10 hours, I lay conscious but bleeding; doctors at a state-of-the-art New York hospital told me I had 50/50 odds. I’ll gloss over medical details but not the key point: this gave me a lot of time to think. And I realized that watching my children grow up is one of the greatest gifts. It’s an adventure beyond even climbing. It’s both the consolation for growing old and the reason I look forward (sort of) to growing old.

In short, if you’re a mother, there are many compelling reasons not to climb. Give my kids a choice: a dead mom fulfilled from climbing or a very much alive mom who’s frustrated and testy from not climbing, maybe even forced into unfulfilling activities (like shopping)? In a blink, I know they’d hand down a life sentence at the mall. …

Still, I climb. Leading to the next question: Why?

Confession No. 5: I don’t believe climbing is safe.

I don’t climb under the delusion that climbing is safer than everyday high-risk activities like driving. But I do believe the rewards from the way I climb now outweigh reasonable risks to my family and me. Climbing makes me happy…and climbing makes me a better mother. Both experiences share the same challenge at the center of a happy, fulfilled life: dealing with risk.

Dangling from the crux on Modern Times reminds me that scary endeavors can be safe and reasonable. Assuming I trusted my harness, knot, and belayer, my only risk was someone calling the Gunks rangers for a rescue — talk about embarrassing! Conversely, a mundane endeavor can be risky — driving, household falls, reality TV (the latter if you count risks to emotional health). With risk, perception versus reality is complex. This is invaluable to remember as a mother, because life as a mom is incredibly scary.

I’d had no idea, but moms face a veritable universe of terrifying threats to our children: molesters (local moms regularly email me warnings about suspicious sightings that turn out to be locked-out dads or magazine-subscription sellers), sabotaged Halloween candy (has anyone ever seen the infamous razorblade inside an apple?), routine fevers revealing obscure brain cancers, bike accidents, obesity, happy 8-year-olds morphing into sullen teenagers, sullen teenagers judging our adult lives. I know most of these (except the last two) are statistically unlikely for my own children but like most moms, I worry — even as I maintain that a life bleached of risk is a life marginalized.

Give kids too little risk, and they’re not forced to strive, mature and achieve, and they end up like my cousin Howard — never married, in his 50s, still living with his mother, working part-time as a substitute teacher. Give kids too much risk by encouraging or pushing them into pursuits beyond their current skillsets and we hurt them — whether physically or emotionally, since they might down the road avoid reasonable challenges in school, socially, or in sports. As parents, we strive for a precarious balance between nurturing our children in the nest but encouraging them to take wing and fly. As climbers, we strive for that same balance between safety and challenge.

And so I still climb, though I stopped ice climbing years ago, lead routes below my already modest ability, drastically overprotect (to my partner’s amusement), and choose pitches with bomber pro and clean leader falls over easier but runout alternatives with crumbly rock and bone-breaker ledges. (A mom on crutches puts a crimp into the entire household.) I don’t climb much, but when I do, I try to share my joy with my family.

Confession No. 6: I hope my children won’t want to climb.

I know how much I’ve gotten from climbing. Before climbing, I was a completely urbanized, single Manhattan professional; through climbing, I discovered camping, the outdoors, and precious adventure otherwise lacking in my structured life. Most of all, I cherish the close climbing friendships, where being tied to another human on the rock captures what’s basic and truest about human relationships.

I hope my children find an activity that gives them similar zest, insight, and joy. I’d prefer it’s skiing or rowing rather than climbing — I’d worry too much. But I’ve introduced them to climbing, believing that they need to makes these choices for themselves.

Confession No. 7: For now, I don’t mind climbing less.

It seems to me that whether a mother should climb is part of a bigger issue facing all mothers: should moms work full time? Stay home full time? Work part time, experiencing some benefits and drawbacks of both? It’s all about how to balance our personal needs with those of our family — how to give so much that our children are nurtured, secure, happy, and beloved. But also how to leave something over, so our happiness isn’t sublimated to that of our children, leaving us squeezed dry and brittle, awful parents.

I have this dream that one day I’ll work out a system like Jannette’s, so I’ll climb once a week. But for now, I have these two adorable little creatures who are convinced I’m the most incredible being on the planet. Being a climbing mom, like being a mom, is about giving up a lot, giving out a lot, and getting back a lot. (Note: the order I rank these elements varies by the day.)

Confession No. 8: This article was incredibly hard to write.

This was one of the most personal articles I’ve ever written. My original intent was to cast the piece as a sociological, third-person overview. So I spoke with friends, interviewed many well-known climbers (moms and dads alike), and emailed a survey to climbing groups. Eventually, I tallied over 75 survey responses and 12-plus hours of phone interviews. (My deep thanks to all who shared.)

But when I showed my editor a draft, he told me something was missing. It needed to be real, personal, and ( Drat! ) confront uneasy truths I hoped to avoid, such as, ready? 1) Climbing and motherhood are pretty incompatible. 2) If your life’s goal, now and later, is to climb as much as possible, you probably shouldn’t become a mom, for odds are high you’ll be miserable and so will your children. 3) And I haven’t even touched on even more painful issues, such as eldercare or special-needs children

There are just no easy answers to the eternal climbing-mom quandary. All I know is that the day after my epic on Modern Times, I was back in countryburbia mom-mode at my daughter’s soccer game, exhilarated from the cliffs, exhilarated from watching my daughter running joyously on the field and my son playing on the sidelines with other children. So I fall back on this: childhood is short, the time to nurture and imprint is fleeting, but the rock will always be there. I’ll just keep doing my pull-ups so that I’ll be ready when my time comes to return to the rock, too.

Longtime climbing writer and Climbing.com Reader Blogger Susan E.B. Schwartz (theschwartzspot.com) wrote the bio of Gunks pioneer Hans Kraus ( Into the Unknown ). She is also a freelance business writer, ex-corporate exec and ex-scuba instructor, and now handyman, cook, chauffeur, homework cheerleader, and stuffed-animal surgeon. Schwartz is at present collaborating on a book with mountaineering dad Carlos Buhler.