Could a $3,000 Mommy-and-Me Wellness Retreat Cure My Parental Burnout?

Yahoo

09-05-2025

Alicia King Photography
When I pulled up in a rental car to the wellness retreat—which, at this time of night, just looked like a dark, frozen cluster of homes—I felt ridiculously, overwhelmingly stressed. It's not that I wasn't looking forward to spending the next 72 hours deep in the mountains bonding with my 2-year-old daughter but from the start, the day hadn't gone as planned.
I'd hoped to get on the road no later than 2:30 pm, but work obligations kept me busy until close to 3. Somewhere between answering emails and editing stories, I realized I hadn't packed my toddler's things for the winter retreat in New York's Catskills, which—according to the weather report—would be hit by a blizzard. I haphazardly grabbed her thickest socks and warmest sweaters, realizing too late she didn't own snow boots. Maybe her beloved glittery boots from Target would have enough traction.
The drive, I believed, would take two hours but, by the time we hit the road from our house in Brooklyn close to 5 p.m., Google Maps showed our trip had jumped to three hours. It would end up taking more like four, the setting sun plunging the car into darkness on the icy roads on the way up to the mountains. My daughter immediately fell asleep, napping way too late in the day and spelling potential doom for the night ahead. Mom fail.
By the time I spent 30 minutes driving the last five unfamiliar miles in utter darkness over a hard-pack of snow, emotion was clogging my throat. What was I doing? Why was I dragging my daughter out to the middle of nowhere for a wellness retreat I'd heard about, that piqued my curiosity as a journalist? This was a holiday weekend, and we could be relaxing with my husband as a family at home. It was pure, all-encompassing mom guilt, a feeling that crept up on me frequently. Here I was again, putting my career in front of my daughter, an unwitting partner in this whole mess. By the time I killed the ignition, I was convinced this entire endeavor would be a disaster.
Before I could unstrap my daughter from her car seat, a woman was at our window. 'Stephanie, welcome,' she said, with a warm smile. 'We're so glad you're here. Come inside and have dinner. We saved some for you.'
About a year ago, I began to have a fantasy.
I'd take the train back from work as usual, but when I walked down my street, I wouldn't climb the stairs to my apartment and shake off the day spent being a senior editor at Glamour and enter into my other job as a mom. Instead, I'd go down to Brooklyn Bridge Park by the water. I'd find a tree with nobody around. I'd put my stuff down and then I'd sink into the grass. I'd lay on my back, feeling the earth. And I'd lie there. For how long, I wasn't sure. I'd stare at the sky as it turned from blue to orange to black and I'd breathe in and out. In and out.
I associate this fantasy with the story of Rip Van Winkle, a tale I had on tape as a child. As the fable goes, Rip fell asleep in the mountains and woke up 20 years later, the childhoods of his children passing him by. I didn't want to skip out on precious moments but what if I could just hit the pause button, to let the world stand still for a minute, to let me catch my breath?
As a full-time working mother in New York City in the year 2025, it goes without saying that I'm burned out. This sentiment is not unique to me, I understand. No matter where they live, every mom I know is burned out, every dad I know is burned out. Hell, many grandparents are also burned out.
The issue is so pervasive that last year, the US Surgeon General declared parental burnout and stress a public health crisis. Citing factors like a lack of support for parents culturally, the need for most families to have two working adults to survive, no federally-mandated paid leave, and rising childcare costs, the former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared in a 2024 advisory that American parents are being pushed to the brink. 'Something has to change,' he wrote.
A few months after Murthy issued this warning, I received an email from a woman named Monica Virga Alborno, the founder of Wanderwild Family Retreats. She explained that she'd started the first-ever wellness retreat in the US that was specifically designed to host mothers and children with the goal of allowing the two to reconnect without the stress of the outside world, and help dispel some anxieties that were so common among modern mothers. She was wondering if I'd like to come check it out.
During the 72-hour, $3,000 per-weekend getaway, she told me, moms and kids have their every need taken care of, from home-cooked meals to diapers and lodging. The programming would include time together, but also time apart, where the children would engage in forest school while the mothers got a chance to participate in activities like yoga and sound baths. The goal? To give moms and their children—together and separately—'space and time to just be.'
'The retreat creates a safe environment for moms to discuss and begin to let go of mom guilt, shame, not being enough, societal pressures, comparisons, and so much more. Moms begin to trust themselves and feel empowered to parent their children in a way that feels authentic to them,' she told me via email.
I was intrigued. At face value, it seemed a little silly to think I needed 'space and time' to bond with my only child. But one of the anxiety wheels constantly running through my brain is that I'm so consumed with getting things done in my life—in-office work, groceries, exercise, the dishes—that she often gets the crumbs of me, the very last wring of the towel each day.
It's not what I want for her or for us, but it's the reality of my situation. Did we need uninhibited time to reconnect outside our hectic day to day? And could going away for the weekend to focus on her solve some of my mom burnout, at least for a little while?
I decided to give it a shot.
On the first day of the retreat, I woke up with a pit in my stomach. We'd missed the first night of programming thanks to the long car ride, but a full day lay ahead. After breakfast, the plan was for the kids to go to 'forest school' while the moms headed off to a day of relaxing activities—yoga followed by a cacao sharing circle, where we were meant to drink hot cups of the ceremonial drink and open up about our lives. Then, we'd all reconvene for lunch.
I felt anxious about this plan. I knew my daughter would not go off with a group of strange caretakers. The retreat was staffed by a group of seven women who specialized in various things, from a childcare professional, a yoga teacher, and energy healers, and while they were obviously kind and competent, my daughter barely holds it together with her standard babysitter. She wasn't headed out into the woods without me.
Sure enough, the mere suggestion that I would be leaving her caused her to panic, to the brink of a meltdown.
'It's fine,' I told the staff, who were simultaneously encouraging me that she would be fine, as my daughter clung to my knees in terror. 'It'll be good for me to observe the children's programming anyway.'
The friendly staff member from last night, Jessica, gave me an encouraging smile. She told me we could work with my daughter together, to ensure she'd feel comfortable enough to strike out on her own. Part of the retreat was for me to engage in self-care and the wellness offerings too, she told me gently. They wanted me to have that experience, to not have to give myself completely to my daughter. I smiled and agreed, but internally remained skeptical. How was I going to successfully participate in—and observe—the retreat if my daughter wouldn't let go of my leg?
At forest school, the calming atmosphere curated by the retreat began to crumble a little. Even at a wellness retreat, kids are still kids. There were 14 of them, and they ranged in ages from tweens to an adorably chunky 5-month old. Some were siblings, and bickered a little as they played in the snow. The babies cried off and on. When we went inside for lunch, some toddlers immediately began pulling at the aesthetically designed tablescape, yanking off the gauzy tablerunner and rolling the glass chalices down the table.
My daughter and I sat across from two sisters, the older of whom delightedly dunked carrots into her milk to get a laugh. But it was controlled chaos, and the best part of it was none of the moms had to deal with any of it because they were still at the cacao sharing circle, an experience I wouldn't get to have due to my kid's stranger danger.
Soon, the moms were back, some red-eyed due to the fact that the circle got intense. I soon found that meal times were the best part of the retreat, for one simple fact. We were treated like queens. The food was amazing, organic and fresh, with vegetables and fruits culled from local farms and prepared by a private chef. The staff filled our glasses with water and produced sippy cups of juice and milk for the kids. Once we were done, we got up and walked away. No prep, no cleanup.
That ease was a large part of the retreat's ethos: the removal of the most mundane parts of parenthood that are commonly referred to as the 'mental load,' and which often fall entirely on the mother. I didn't need to bring my daughter a cup or snacks. I brought no toys, because there was an entire playroom filled with the latest Lovevery offerings, books, and a play tent. There was milk in the fridge and diapers in the closet. When I needed a baby wipe to clean my daughter's face or wipe her nose, one appeared next to me like magic.
The space was also beautiful. There were two main guest houses, a yoga studio, and a dining area with reclaimed wood tables. For every meal, we had personalized name cards, each adorned with a different type of tree or flower. My daughter and I had our own spacious room with a private en suite bathroom, as did every guest. Everything was intentionally designed by founder Monica Virga Alborno, who tapped the experience of her sister, a wedding planner, to curate it.
By the afternoon, I could feel myself begin to relax because my daughter was finally having fun. I could see the excitement in her face as she ran into the play area, throwing herself into the tent. She took an immediate liking to another child about a year older than her, following after her like a baby duck. My daughter had even given her stamp of approval to the programming, declaring she now 'loves yoga.'
When I took her upstairs to our room before dinner for a break, she stared at the door wistfully.
'Mama, can we go back with the kids?' she said.
After dinner, Jessica got down at her level. There would be a movie night downstairs for all the kids, with popcorn and treats, while the adults were invited to go to a sound bath in the yoga studio. Would my daughter like to go? She looked at me nervously for a second, and then took Jessica's hand.
Before I left her I looked back one more time, to see her giggling next to her new bestie in a pile of pillows. Maybe this really is good for her, I thought.
Monica Virga Alborno doesn't fit the archetype of a woman who would start a holistic wellness retreat for moms to connect with their children. For one, she's a former petroleum engineer, and she gives off that energy. She's approaching the problem of burnout and stress among American parents as an engineer, by identifying a problem, implementing a plan, and seeking results.
'I think [stress] is amplified for American mothers,' she tells me as we sit across from each other in front of a roaring fire, mugs of tea in hand. 'There's just so much. We're so overstimulated here with all of the news cycles and just how we've grown up—everything we've consumed, everything that we're exposed to, even the way people speak to us growing up, it's just amplified here.'
Virga Alborno is originally from New Jersey, but she isn't raising her kids in the states. After college, she embarked on a career as an engineer on oil rigs, traveling and working everywhere from Sub-Saharan Africa to the Middle East. It's how she met her husband, who is originally from Saudi Arabia, and once they moved to Norway for work together, they decided to put down roots. Then, Monica had her daughter, now 4, and her world forever changed.
'I felt like I completely lost myself [at first],' she tells me. 'I felt like a failure. I couldn't even feed her. She was hungry. I had no time or space to just be with myself. It's all these things that we all struggle with where you're like, but this beautiful person has also entered my life and it's amazing. And I am like, I need somewhere to go and really just explore.'
Her words resonated. The main problem with the American system of motherhood, in my estimation, is that we are expected to be everything all at once. When we're at work, we're expected to act like we aren't mothers, to pretend that our children and the obligations we have to them don't exist. And then, once we get home, we're expected to mother like we don't work or have any other obligations.
But any working mother knows that this is impossible, that goes against our very DNA. When I started a new job eight months after having my daughter, I found myself desperate to talk about her, for people to know she existed. She was like a crush I couldn't stop bringing up, because I was so consumed by her I didn't know how to pretend I wasn't. On my first day, I found one of her pacifiers tucked away in a pocket of my purse, left over from when I had used it as a diaper bag. Throughout the day, I found myself cupping it in my hand, stroking it as if it could tether me to her.
And it's not looking promising that things could get any better. A few months after the parental burnout report was issued, Donald Trump won the presidential election, dashing hopes that Murthy's warning could lead to any meaningful change in support for parents. The Trump administration, according to a report late last month, is interested in encouraging women to have more babies, but not in implementing any of the policies that could actually move the needle in making parenthood easier. After the New York Times reported that the proposals included a $5,000 'baby bonus' and a 'medal' for women who have more than six children, parents across the country reacted with outrage. Part of the reason the Trump proposals were met with such ire is the intensity of the problem. So many parents are desperate to fix the system, to make having a family and being able to afford their lives something other than a pipe dream.
'Most women we hear from aren't opting out of motherhood—rather, they simply can't afford it,' Erin Erenberg, the CEO and cofounder of Chamber of Mothers, told me at the time. 'That's not a cultural crisis. That's a policy failure.'
Virga Alborno, I realized, was articulating one of the main issues leading to this burnout crisis among American parents. Trying to be both separate parts of ourselves isn't working. We'd all be healthier and happier if we were allowed to be everything, all at once. And when we aren't, everyone is losing.
It's something she's observed as someone who is both an American mother, but not parenting in America. Virga Alborno and her husband have decided to raise their now-two kids in Norway because, she says, the quality of life for families is so much better.
'I think they just seem to have a slower pace and things are just simpler,' she says. 'People cook at home a lot more. They eat a lot of local food. There's no Amazon there. They've done a lot to put in place where you really have to support your community, your neighbors, you buy from your neighbors, you spend time in your community. It's just a lot slower, simpler.'
She began to feel the urge to bring this type of parenting to the US, to allow American moms a chance to, as she put it, 'take a pause.' Within months, she'd mapped out a business plan, working on it alongside her full-time job. The first Wanderwild retreat was in June 2022, and they've since had seven; they've also launched virtual events and a podcast. Virga Alborno , who has funded the entire venture herself, recently quit her job to work on Wanderwild full-time.
A tricky thing to navigate has been how to keep the retreats feel luxurious, with childcare and high-quality food, while not making the weekend exorbitantly expensive. Still, it's not cheap, the weekend costs between $3,287-$3,650, with $450 for an additional child (my fee was comped for the purpose of sharing my honest thoughts in this story.) Two of the participants flew in, one from Louisiana and one from Texas, adding to the cost.
Virga Alborno has reduced the price over time—it used to be closer to $5,000—and offers scholarships to those who ask, but admits she struggles with the fact that she knows her program isn't accessible to everyone. While everyone at my retreat got their own room and bathroom, for the upcoming 2026 retreats Wanderwild is offering an option to share a room and bathroom for $2,472, offering a less expensive option.
Virga Alborno she has big dreams—expanding the retreats all over the country and offering more to as many people as possible.
She knows that she can't solve the parental burnout crisis with one weekend away. But she wants moms to be able to experience it, even if just for a short time.
'Our main mission is to really just treat this as a very sacred time in your life,' she tells me. 'When you really are intentional about it, there's so much to learn about yourself. There's so much to learn about your child. There's so much your child can teach you, and there's so much with your connection with one another, your personalities, all of your inner workings that are just so synchronistic and also just so unique to you, your relationship. And a lot of times we miss that because we're so busy.'
The snow fell hard and fast on the last night of the retreat, when I stomped outside with the rest of the moms for a fireside sharing circle. I had spent the day with the rest of the moms, my daughter proudly heading off to forest school clutching the hand of her new best friend.
Before the sharing circle, Virga Alborno instructed us to spend about 10 minutes walking around in the woods and just being. We should smell the earth, the snow, the trees. By this point, I had dropped my defenses a little. Yes, it felt a little weird to try and connect with the Earth, but when was the last time I had done so? Truthfully, when was the last time I had 10 minutes of solitude in nature to feel my breath, the air on my face, to just be?
Shortly after we gathered around the fire. The 10 moms standing with me had shared so much about their lives over the course of the two days of sound baths, yoga, and just casual conversations. One shared how she navigated parenting her stepchild alongside her two biological children, another spoke candidly about her divorce. Moms with older children gave advice to those of us with younger ones. They shared their family trauma, their difficulties with their own parents, and their frustrations with their kids. I felt like at that moment I could admit anything—my resentments, my fears, my anger—and it would just be accepted, a rarity in the world of hyper-competitive parenting.
This openness, says Virga Alborno, is also by design. Sometimes it's easier to confess things to people you've never met before, even if it feels weird at first. And even though we were strangers, we all had a powerful bond. We were mothers, so on some level, we got it.
'It can feel easier to open up to people that you don't know, and especially ones that are on a similar journey,' she says. 'Everyone's so different, but you all have a lot of similarities in that you wanted to come and experience this. So the things that we're talking about, the experiences you're having here, you all, whether you realize it or not, you kind of wanted that. So you get each other, you feel very comfortable.'
I hadn't really included myself in that group of people who wanted to come and experience this, but maybe I should have. Because I needed time and space to breathe, even if I had shrouded it in the guise of work. And when had been the last time my daughter and I had three days to focus on just ourselves? To play together, to laugh together, to sleep in the same bed, and step away from the daily grind together? It had been a long time.
Going on a retreat didn't solve my mom burnout. But it did, for a little while, give me a reprieve.
I find myself thinking often of our time together in the woods, especially the ways in which I felt uncomfortable. Maybe, I've come to wonder, I felt so anxious being there because I didn't want to admit to myself that I needed to take a rest. That I'm so focused on constantly succeeding at everything, the perfect employee, the perfect mom, the perfect friend and daughter and wife, that the idea of asking for a space to, as Virga Alborno put it, just be, felt scarier than just plowing through. But maybe that's not what's best for me, or my daughter.
'I think that we could start living in a way that feels good and stop doing things that we think we should do because we've been told that we should,' she says. 'We just add more and more to our plate without really fully understanding why we're saying yes to things. So I feel like it's okay to stir the pot. It's okay to say no to things that don't feel right. It's okay to not want to climb for a little while and maybe just sitting where you are for a little bit to not always pile up your week. To just kind of get back to the basics, to just slow down.'
It's getting warmer in New York City now, and the idea of being in a blizzard with my daughter in the woods doing sound baths feels very far away. I'm back to the grind, I haven't slowed down.
But I am trying. I curate time together, just the two of us, phones down. I try to be in the moment as much as I can, to take her outside and experience life with her. I try to remember that I don't have to be everything for everyone all the time.
I often think fondly of our time together upstate. I think of my daughter on my lap, listening to a sound bath or watching her attempt yoga poses. How happy she looked playing with her friend, who she still brings up occasionally when discussing her 'besties.' How I threw an intention into the fire that night to stay present, to enjoy my life instead of just grinding through it. And how every night we slept together, her small hand resting between my shoulder blades. Just she and I.
Originally Appeared on Glamour
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