For years, Serena Williams has been shattering expectations of what athletes can do when they become mothers — including winning the Australian Open at 8 weeks pregnant, making a Grand Slam final following a C-section and pulmonary embolism, and playing at the highest level of the sport while breastfeeding.
Williams, who announced that she’ll soon retire from tennis in the September issue of Vogue, noted in her essay that breastfeeding was among the many motherhood-related struggles she experienced when returning to tennis after the birth of her daughter, Olympia, in September 2017. In a way, that makes Williams a lot like many other nursing moms who are returning to work after having a baby.
In a recent What to Expect survey, 59 percent of moms said nursing was harder than they thought it would be, while 23 percent called breastfeeding “exhausting.”
In the same survey, 16 percent said they stopped breastfeeding because they had to go back to work or school. Likewise, Williams stopped breastfeeding after about 8 months to accelerate her training. (In What to Expect’s survey, 62 percent of moms reported that they’ve stopped breastfeeding by 6 months.)
In one scene in the 2018 HBO documentary Being Serena, Williams’s coach, Patrick Mouratoglou, tells her that she can’t return to being a top tennis player until she stops breastfeeding. Williams says later in the episode that, as much as she loves breastfeeding her daughter, she’s ready to stop nursing because she misses playing in and winning tennis tournaments.
Still, while Williams’s experience with breastfeeding was in some ways very similar to a typical mom’s, her journey was extraordinary. Anyone who has breastfed could attest to this, myself included.
I have two sons, and after each of my deliveries, I looked forward to running for exercise again. But both times, I found that my breastmilk supply would drop any time I tried to increase my mileage. And when I say “increase mileage,” I’m talking pretty modest numbers — from a 3-mile to a 4-mile jog, no more than a few times a week. Williams attended intensive, day-long training sessions, day in and day out. I can’t imagine what she must have gone through to ensure she was eating and hydrating enough to not only support her as an elite athlete, but also as a nursing mom whose breastmilk supply depended on it.
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It’s also remarkable that Williams even found the time to breastfeed for 8 months, given her demanding training and travel schedule, which included jetting to a training academy in France to prepare for tennis’s clay court season. In those early weeks and months, babies can feed up to eight to twelve times a day. For infants who are grazers, like mine were, nursing sessions can last around an hour each time. That’s upwards of eight hours a day that new moms have to devote to feeding their children if they want to breastfeed.
Even for the rare times that I stepped away to run an errand or have some time to myself, missing a feeding session, I had to figure out the logistics of pumping to prevent my breasts from becoming engorged and uncomfortable. So the fact that Williams attended a training academy that put her to work for hours a day — all while breastfeeding — shows just how dedicated and focused she needed to be to successfully nurse her daughter.
As Williams looks toward retirement, we should all acknowledge and celebrate the incredible effort she put into nursing her daughter and training for her return to tennis at the same time. In doing so, we’ll also honor the challenges that moms everywhere face in trying to breastfeed their children while returning to some semblance of normalcy in their own lives.
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