How 4 Days in Mexico Helped Me Reclaim Myself After Motherhood

Boarding the flight to Cabo with my husband, Alejandro, my arms felt unnervingly gentle. It was our first journey with out Ona, our five-month-old daughter. “She’ll be positive,” my mother-in-law had reassured me the night time earlier than, as I stroked Ona’s sandy hair.

Nonetheless, my coronary heart felt a bit hole because the aircraft took off and Austin disappeared beneath the clouds. Would I be capable to benefit from the subsequent 4 days on the Baja Peninsula? Or would I spend our romantic trip weeping into the therapeutic massage pillow and, on the seashore, seeing Ona’s face once I regarded up from my ebook, as a substitute of the crashing surf?

Ona, in the event you’re studying this years from now, forgive me for saying that these anxieties—and all the opposite incessant motherly panics about bottles, diapers, and naps—had melted away by sundown, once I sat on the terrace of our suite at Rosewood’s Las Ventanas al Paraíso, gazing on the Sea of Cortés. 

I hadn’t realized, because the one doing a lot soothing over the previous 5 months, how badly I wanted to be soothed myself. I had grown expert at studying Ona’s cues—however what about my very own? The ocean held my gaze, lulling my frazzled nervous system (as did the proper Mexican margarita, placing Texan variations to disgrace). I rested my head on Alejandro’s shoulder. Explosions of carmine bougainvillea and slate-green spikes of agave studded the desert panorama. I felt, in a rush, how very drained I used to be. However right here, in contrast to at dwelling, I might relaxation. 

First it was time for some grown-up leisure: a tasting within the lodge’s hidden wine cellar. However as Alejandro and I entered the area, I felt my shoulders tense up. After months of cooing and babbling at a child, my grownup vocabulary felt distinctly missing, and my wine phrases all however forgotten. As I stammered my impressions of an orange wine from San Miguel de Allende, the lodge’s excellent wine director, Geneviève Rioux, urged me to belief myself. 

“Girls are too self-conscious about describing wines,” she stated. Rioux referred to her personal tasting model as synesthetic: for instance, when she sips “velvety, floaty” wines, resembling purple Burgundies from significantly “swish AOCs,” she hears Debussy’s La Mer. (Previous to pursuing a profession in wine, Rioux educated as a classical pianist and flutist in her native Quebec.) “Wine is like love,” she instructed us. “Advanced and contradictory. There aren’t any guidelines.” 

Most ladies endure first-trimester nausea throughout being pregnant. Mine had lasted all day, day-after-day, for 9 months. I might barely eat, work, or see pals. My solely craving was to not be pregnant anymore. I fantasized day by day about what I might eat once I lastly felt hungry once more. If I might, I might time-travel again to that struggling self now and inform her it might all be positive: she would have a good looking, wholesome daughter and would quickly be seated at a desk overlooking softly lapping swimming pools, savoring a seasonal Tuscan feast ready by chef Matteo Temperini. From the native king prawns bathed in buffalo mozzarella and freckled with caviar to the giddy hairpin turns of scallion, blueberry, goat cheese, and sea bass within the third course, the meal was beautiful and pleasure-soaked—every little thing I wanted.

The subsequent morning, after a sweaty tennis match, Ale and I donned terry-cloth robes and headed to the spa. I had anticipated soothing New Age music and competent palms figuring out the baby-bouncing knots in my shoulders. What we skilled was nearer to a rebirth. The therapy started with a therapeutic ceremony within the spa’s lush outside lounge, the place a small orchestra of native devices re-created the sounds of the jungle, full with jaguar screams. The massages have been deftly transcendent. However it was the hydrotherapy space—so usually an afterthought—that was this spa’s beating coronary heart. A chapel-like steam room, an icy plunge pool, a sauna set to the proper temperature, and a gargantuan sizzling tub. Afterward, I checked out Alejandro within the lounge chair subsequent to mine and squeezed his hand earlier than we each fell right into a swaddled half-sleep, like freshly bathed infants.

Due to a gentle textual content stream of smiling Ona pictures from Ale’s mother and father, by the third day at Las Ventanas, I had relaxed into a brand new sort of maternity depart. One the place you permit your child at dwelling, trusting that she is in loving palms, and that you’ll return to her absolutely recharged, hungry to mom once more. 

Within the 4 a long time earlier than Ona’s delivery, I used to be many issues: a author, a traveler, an athlete, and a meals and wine lover. Over our 4 days at Las Ventanas, I reconnected with every of those selves, from delighting in contemporary, modern components (simply the most effective lodge meals Alejandro and I’ve ever had) and an excellent non-public tennis lesson with coach John Stein to lastly getting a goddamn pedicure. Let me put it this manner: if at some point you notice your toenail polish is older than your child, like I did, it’s time for an adults-only escape.

On our closing night time, fireworks pierced the nonetheless air. Briefly again in mother mode, I panicked: the noise will wake Ona! Then I remembered she was quick asleep in Texas. I joined Alejandro outdoors to savor the show. Tomorrow, we’d maintain our daughter in our arms once more, and watch her gazing in marvel on the daylight dancing on the ceiling as solely infants can. However tonight, it was our flip to stare, childlike, on the shimmering gold sparks, and maintain one another shut. 

{Couples} remedy can strengthen your relationship and aid you face your deepest fears. However a {couples} trip had introduced us again to the love that created our daughter within the first place. Typically, the most effective parenting isn’t about sacrifice. It’s about taking a break, basking within the solar, and letting your self be babied for as soon as. 

A model of this story first appeared within the February 2025 difficulty of Journey + Leisure beneath the headline “Maternity Depart.”