When professional rock and ice climber Majka Burhardt learned she was pregnant with twins back in 2015, she began composing letters, notes and recordings for them.

At the time, Burhardt was in her late 30’s and had recently started a nonprofit, Legado. She was on the verge of promoting the film, Namuli, which would involve intensive travel. Learning she was not only pregnant, but pregnant with twins, was both thrilling and terrifying.

“My desire to continue climbing, grow the organization I was a founder of, and tend to my marriage – I realized I didn’t know how to do all that and be a mom,” said Burhardt, who lives in Jackson, New Hampshire, via phone.

But writing to her children, Irenna and Kaz, helped her find her way through this period of uncertainty. Some entries were short snippets, others drawn-out missives. Many were composed via audio journal while Burhardt was driving, climbing, or hiking.

“I didn’t create any rules around it. I didn’t do it intentionally. It was in those moments when I needed to say something – that’s when I did it,” she said.

The topics? This is what I’m terrified of. This is how I know I love you. This is what I don’t get. In one entry, she wrote about slowing down to accommodate them.

“On the one hand, I was proud of myself for that. Then I thought, oh my gosh, is this the first step on a slippery slope of giving in? And what does that mean, ‘giving in?’ Why do I care about that?” she said. “I am not so bow-headed that I thought I would be pregnant and nothing would change, but I was blindsided by how much change had to happen.”

Initially, Burhardt thought she’d give the letters to her kids one day. It wasn’t until the twins were three years old that she began seeing these entries as part of a memoir.

The result – “More: Life on the Edge of Adventure and Motherhood,” published this past March – is an epistolary memoir that chronicles Burhardt’s pregnancy and the first four and a half years of her kids’ lives, largely made up of these unedited letters and audio journal entries.

Burhardt says it’s eerie, rereading and listening to these early thoughts about what being a mother to twins would be like. So many of her premonitions turned out to be right. It was a lot – for her career, for her marriage – and it felt wrong to structure the book in a traditional format with an “all-knowing” narrator. She thought keeping the material in its raw state would offer more of an emotional punch.

“I can read excerpts of it and think, ‘Woof, that’s uncomfortable.’ But I kept that because I think it’s important we start having a dialogue about what it really means to become a parent, and what it means to tend to a young family,” she said. “It’s how we’re going to move the needle on things like paid leave and true division of labor in a non-gendered way.”

Since its release, Burhardt says she’s received so much positive feedback from new parents who’ve told her the book gave them hope when they too were feeling the challenges of being parents while building the careers and lives they desired.

Today, Burhardt is the director of Legado, which works alongside Indigenous people and local communities in places important for biodiversity to ensure they’re provided with tools, resources, and partnerships to create solutions that benefit their communities and landscapes. It has quadrupled in size since she became pregnant, in part because of what she learned through the journey of parenting her twins.

“It’s been a really dynamic time in my life, learning how to show up in my life as a mom with kids and through social entrepreneurship,” she said.

Her kids are now six and a half. Burhardt says they love skiing, climbing, swimming, coloring, and playing dress-up. She says it’s so important to her, how she shows up as a mom, and she regularly emphasizes that there’s still so much she doesn’t know. She’s still learning alongside them.

“I’ll say to them, ‘I don’t know how to do this. I’m learning how to be in the world, just like you’re learning how to be in the world,’” she said. “Making them resilient humans is really important to me, and I think, in turn, it’s helping me build resilience myself.”

Burhardt talks about “More: Life on the Edge of Adventure and Motherhood,” at Gibson’s Bookstore on Tuesday, April 11, at 6:30 p.m. For more about Burhardt and her work, visit majkaburhardt.com.

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