How 4 Days in Mexico Helped Me Reclaim Myself After Motherhood

Boarding the flight to Cabo with my husband, Alejandro, my arms felt unnervingly light. It was our first trip without Ona, our five-month-old daughter. “She’ll be fine,” my mother-in-law had reassured me the night before, as I stroked Ona’s sandy hair.

Still, my heart felt a little hollow as the plane took off and Austin disappeared beneath the clouds. Would I be able to enjoy the next four days on the Baja Peninsula? Or would I spend our romantic vacation weeping into the massage pillow and, on the beach, seeing Ona’s face when I looked up from my book, instead of the crashing surf?

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

I hadn’t realized, as the one doing so much soothing over the past five months, how badly I needed to be soothed myself. I had grown skilled at reading Ona’s cues—but what about my own? The sea held my gaze, lulling my frazzled nervous system (as did the perfect Mexican margarita, putting Texan versions to shame). I rested my head on Alejandro’s shoulder. Explosions of carmine bougainvillea and slate-green spikes of agave studded the desert landscape. I felt, in a rush, how very tired I was. But here, unlike at home, I could rest. 

First it was time for some grown-up relaxation: a tasting in the hotel’s hidden wine cellar. But as Alejandro and I entered the space, I felt my shoulders tense up. After months of cooing and babbling at a baby, my adult vocabulary felt distinctly lacking, and my wine terms all but forgotten. As I stammered my impressions of an orange wine from San Miguel de Allende, the hotel’s superb wine director, Geneviève Rioux, urged me to trust myself. 

“Women are too self-conscious about describing wines,” she said. Rioux referred to her own tasting style as synesthetic: for example, when she sips “velvety, floaty” wines, such as red Burgundies from particularly “graceful AOCs,” she hears Debussy’s La Mer. (Prior to pursuing a career in wine, Rioux trained as a classical pianist and flutist in her native Quebec.) “Wine is like love,” she told us. “Complex and contradictory. There are no rules.” 

Most women endure first-trimester nausea during pregnancy. Mine had lasted all day, every day, for nine months. I could barely eat, work, or see friends. My only craving was to not be pregnant anymore. I fantasized daily about what I would eat when I finally felt hungry again. If I could, I would time-travel back to that suffering self now and tell her it would all be fine: she would have a beautiful, healthy daughter and would soon be seated at a table overlooking softly lapping pools, savoring a seasonal Tuscan feast prepared by chef Matteo Temperini. From the local king prawns bathed in buffalo mozzarella and freckled with caviar to the giddy hairpin turns of scallion, blueberry, goat cheese, and sea bass in the third course, the meal was exquisite and pleasure-soaked—everything I needed.

The next morning, after a sweaty tennis match, Ale and I donned terry-cloth robes and headed to the spa. I had expected soothing New Age music and competent hands working out the baby-bouncing knots in my shoulders. What we experienced was closer to a rebirth. The treatment began with a healing ceremony in the spa’s lush outdoor lounge, where a small orchestra of local instruments re-created the sounds of the jungle, complete with jaguar screams. The massages were deftly transcendent. But it was the hydrotherapy area—so often an afterthought—that was this spa’s beating heart. A chapel-like steam room, an icy plunge pool, a sauna set to the perfect temperature, and a gargantuan hot tub. Afterward, I looked at Alejandro in the lounge chair next to mine and squeezed his hand before we both fell into a swaddled half-sleep, like freshly bathed infants.

Thanks to a steady text stream of smiling Ona photos from Ale’s parents, by the third day at Las Ventanas, I had relaxed into a new kind of maternity leave. One where you leave your baby at home, trusting that she is in loving hands, and that you will return to her fully recharged, hungry to mother again. 

In the four decades before Ona’s birth, I was many things: a writer, a traveler, an athlete, and a food and wine lover. Over our four days at Las Ventanas, I reconnected with each of these selves, from delighting in fresh, innovative ingredients (easily the best hotel food Alejandro and I have ever had) and a brilliant private tennis lesson with coach John Stein to finally getting a goddamn pedicure. Let me put it this way: if one day you realize your toenail polish is older than your baby, like I did, it’s time for an adults-only escape.

On our final night, fireworks pierced the still air. Briefly back in mom mode, I panicked: the noise will wake Ona! Then I remembered she was fast asleep in Texas. I joined Alejandro outside to savor the display. Tomorrow, we would hold our daughter in our arms again, and watch her gazing in wonder at the sunlight dancing on the ceiling as only babies can. But tonight, it was our turn to stare, childlike, at the shimmering gold sparks, and hold each other close. 

Couples therapy can strengthen your relationship and help you face your deepest fears. But a couples vacation had brought us back to the love that created our daughter in the first place. Sometimes, the best parenting isn’t about sacrifice. It’s about taking a break, basking in the sun, and letting yourself be babied for once. 

A version of this story first appeared in the February 2025 issue of Travel + Leisure under the headline “Maternity Leave.”