Writer Ariel Levy offers a heart-wrenching account of adventure and coming into motherhood in her essay called “Thanksgiving in Mongolia,” featured in The New Yorker.
People were alarmed when I told them where I was going, but I was pleased with myself. I liked the idea of being the kind of woman who’d go to the Gobi Desert pregnant, just as, at twenty-two, I’d liked the idea of being the kind of girl who’d go to India by herself.