A working mum’s love letter to Serena Williams

One can be truly triumphant even in the face of defeat. Just ask tennis superstar Serena Williams, 36, who claimed the runners-up trophy at Wimbledon last month, less than a year after giving birth and simultaneously making herself a hero to working mums everywhere.

“It was such an amazing tournament for me,” Williams told an enthralled crowd following the match. “I was really happy to get this far. It’s obviously disappointing, but I can’t be disappointed because there’s so much to look forward to. To all the mums out there I was playing for you today, and I tried.”

Serena Williams grew up a little black girl competing in what was very much a white man’s sport. The discrimination she and her sister, Venus, faced during their rise and rise in the sport is well-documented. Children can be especially cruel, often expressing the same prejudices but without that thin veil of civility their parents do. The brutality of that racism taught Serena Williams to be tough. She learned that by winning, you prove the haters wrong. When you win, they can’t touch you.

Back in July 2016, before the birth of her daughter Alexis Olympia Ohanian Jr, Williams was interviewed ahead of another Wimbledon match. A journalist threw her one of those easy warm-up questions, asking how she responded to being called one of the greatest female athletes of all time. Williams didn’t skip a beat before declaring, “I prefer… ‘one of the greatest athletes of all time’”.

Strength is a peculiar concept. So often we associate being ‘strong’ with masculinity; physical power that is characterised by a ripped upper body and the ability to lift great weight. Whereas we consistently underestimate the kind of physical strength that is uniquely feminine; the strength involved in birthing a child. A woman’s ability to withstand enormous pain, to grow and bring a human being into the world – under tremendous stress to the body – and then recover. Her ability to balance both, combined with an incredible mental toughness, makes Williams extraordinary.

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Yet it’s a different set of attributes entirely that make Serena Williams so damn appealing. In fact, what has transformed her into the modern mum’s pin-up girl are the utterly ordinary struggles of being a working parent. Williams’ entry into motherhood isn’t entirely relatable (my husband didn’t fly me to Italy on a private jet for pasta when I had a craving for carbonara – or, at least, not often). She has the kind of help and resources that are a galaxy away from yours and mine. However, the emotional and systemic challenges she’s come up against are remarkably similar.

Earlier in the year, Williams withdrew from the Australian Open, physically not ready to compete again yet. So by the time the French Open came around, she entered the competition unseeded. Despite taking a break from the sport as the number one player in the world, Williams was ranked at 453rd when she returned to tennis. Tennis draws are designed to maximise the chances the higher ranked players will compete in the final, so being seeded so low meant Williams faced tougher matches earlier in the tournament.

Dispelling the one-size-fits-all myth about women’s bodies and how they change after birth, Williams said: “What I’ve learned through the experience — everybody is different, every person is different, every physical body is different.. for my body, it didn’t work, no matter how much I worked out, no matter how much I did, it didn’t work for me.” The frustration of your mothering experience crashing up against an established norm is painful. It reassures me to know Williams hasn’t shied away from that.

Inspiration is a term that gets overused in the era of Instagram, but it justly applies here. Serena Williams inspires not just fellow tennis players – many rising stars, particularly women of colour, say Williams is the reason they fell in love with the sport – but working women everywhere. It feels trite, yet Williams’ combination of feminism, dedication and hard-won achievement deserves no lesser descriptor.

As she wrote in The Guardian back in 2016, “What others marked as flaws or disadvantages about myself – my race, my gender – I embraced as fuel for my success. I never let anything or anyone define me or my potential. I controlled my future.” Be still my beating heart, and that of working mothers everywhere. We have a new heroine, and she just happens to be The Greatest Of All Time.

Jamila Rizvi is editor-at-large of Future Women, a new content-led women's club where this story originally appeared. Join now for less than $2 a week.