I grew up in Sun Valley, Idaho, a small Western ski town nestled among rolling hills—alternately covered in sagebrush and snow—and surrounded by dramatic mountains. One day, my mom received a padded manila envelope in the mail containing a VHS tape. The tape showed her mountain biking at blurring speed while being chased by a black bear. It turned out that some folks in a camper van had been feeding—and filming—the bear from the start; when my mom innocently biked by, it suddenly decided she might make a better snack. Fortunately, she was able to speed away and into the safety of their camper, all while they documented the harrowing scene on a camcorder. So Idaho.

Mom grew up very poor in a tiny hamlet in Sweden near the Arctic Circle, where summer days are endlessly blessed by sun and winter days are frozen in twilight and darkness. She and her sisters would ski to the one-room schoolhouse, where children of all ages studied together. Now in her 70s, she remains a ferocious Nordic skier. A 25 km ski is her average weekday jaunt. She excelled academically and this offered her a ticket to the wider world; she became the first person in her family to graduate from university, attending the Kungliga Tekniska Hogskolan, basically Sweden’s MIT, and became the only woman in her year to graduate with a master’s degree in electrical engineering. While on a business trip for Hewlett-Packard in Sun Valley, she met my dad, a musician, on a ski lift. They spent several days skiing together, and eventually she moved to the States, where they lived in a trailer shared by the two of them, Dad’s golden retriever, and shortly thereafter, my brother and I.

When I was a baby, she slept with me in a sleeping bag—nothing between us and the stars—and taught my brother and me to forage for berries and mushrooms once we could walk. Mom’s love of nature and adventure, athleticism, and extreme grit are all qualities that I’d like to think I’ve inherited from her and transmuted subconsciously into my experience as a ballerina—I’ve been a principal dancer at American Ballet Theatre since 2014. Often, when I dance, I conjure the sense of enchantment I felt while hiking through wild landscapes or gazing at stars in the Idaho Sawtooth Mountains, which helps me convey emotion to the back row of the opera house. The feeling of awe you can experience while listening to a live orchestra is surprisingly similar to that of drinking in a beautiful landscape or smelling the scent of earth and pine.

As I got older, Mom drove me to endless ballet lessons, sewed the ribbons onto my first pointe shoes, and made costumes for me on her sewing machine in the basement of our house. (By that time, we had moved to another beautiful mountain town, Boulder, Colorado.) She almost never wore makeup and therefore her attempts at doing my stage makeup for recitals resulted in me looking not dissimilar to Aunt Gladys in the movie Weapons. During my teen years, the intense love I felt for her sometimes gave way to an intense anger, like the time she gave me a bad haircut and I locked myself in the bathroom to scream wordless, bloodcurdling screams while banging a hairbrush against the counter.

Probably the most useful thing I inherited from Mom is her grit and determination. Any professional ballet dancer you encounter will have an exceptional ability to work hard and withstand setbacks and physical pain.

But there’s an internal furnace that propels me relentlessly forward even on my worst days—from doing 32 fouettes on an ankle with torn ligaments, to showing up, sleep-deprived, for the monk-like ritual of morning ballet class with my joints calcified by a performance of Swan Lake the night before. This determination also carried me through performing ABT’s notoriously difficult Nutcracker while three months pregnant—one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I’ll never forget how emotional it was to hear Tchaikovsky’s most romantic adagio swelling up from the orchestra pit while performing for a packed house, all while my baby was secretly onstage with me.

Now that I’m less than two months away from giving birth to my first child, I’ve thought a lot about what I want to pass on to him. I want him to know the beauty of the mountain west and the incomparable freedom of movement and athleticism. I hope he’ll inherit my mom’s fearlessness and sense of adventure. Maybe she’ll even teach him to speak Swedish! And I hope I can help him to feel safe and have the resilience and belief in himself to become whoever he is meant to be.

Hand Me Down is a series, with a new essay appearing each day through Mother’s Day, celebrating the gifts—tangible and intangible—that our mothers give us.