Childbirth changes women’s bodies forever – and we need to be realistic about it
‘MMy biggest problem is that I don’t feel like I’m in my body,” Naomi Osaka wrote on Instagram this week. A year after her daughter was born, the Grand Slam champion, who returned to the competitive circuit in January, is struggling to find her form. “I’m trying to tell myself ‘it’s fine, you’re doing great’ … Inside I can hear myself screaming ‘what the hell is happening?!?!'”
That’s awful, but how fantastic that she talks about how she feels. Traditionally, vulnerability is not welcome in top-level sport, an environment of “stigma around mental health issues, a high threshold for help-seeking behavior and a low sense of psychological safety,” as one study described it last year. Yet so much of the success of top athletes is in their heads; of course they falter, they are constantly exposed to pressures that would crush us normal people (it’s no surprise that research suggests they may with a higher risk of harmful psychological complaints.
Osaka helped change that. Her high-profile withdrawal from the 2021 French Open, citing fears heightened by press commitments she couldn’t keep, reinforced an important conversation that others have continued: Adam Peaty; the diver Noah Williams, who this week discussed his depression; and two athletes we usually call supermen, Michael Phelps and Simone Biles.
Because they are human, and superhuman too. Their vulnerability makes them more, not less, impressive. Recent research confirmed my gut feeling: the public is supportive for athletes who are dealing with psychological problems.
What strikes me is that Osaka describes a feeling that most people who have given birth—not just elite athletes—would recognize. “Not in my body” hits the nail on the head when it comes to the alienation from your former self that can occur in the months and even years after childbirth. The body I live in now was reshaped by “easy” pregnancies and “good” births in my supposedly resilient and resilient 20s: by the undiagnosed hernia I had for three years; by the abdominal muscles that no amount of Pilates could fully repair; by the wobbly perineum (sorry, but we have to talk about these things).
And I got off lightly. Research this year showed that childbirth is a traumatic experience for one in three women. (I often catch myself thinking about PMSLLuce Brett’s brilliantly funny, angry, and sad memoir, which explores how “an hour of pushing” left her with a legacy of incontinence, and in passing reveals an unspoken world of birth injuries around her.) You’re no longer in your body when you grow and then push another body out — and that must be a lot stranger to navigate when that body is your tool and your livelihood.
A new, optimistic narrative about elite athletes returning from pregnancy and childbirth has emerged in recent years. It began to crystallize when Jessica Ennis-Hill won the world championships 13 months after delivery and shortly afterwards a silver medal at the Olympic Games.
Laura Kenny, who won two Olympic medals after having her first child, has written about it how this change of attitude benefited british sportThere were nine mothers in Team GB at these Olympics; they won seven medals.
That is – they are – astonishing. Normalizing the success of mothers is a powerful corrective to the deep-seated prejudice that motherhood weakens women. “It was one or the other – you were either a current Olympian or a mother,” Kenny wrote in the Guardian of the mindset she had internalized. It should also mean that women get more and better support in returning to elite sport after giving birth (Denise Lewis described her attempt to return to heptathlon without support after the birth of her daughter in 2002 as a “very lonely experience”).
It is not bleak or alarmist to say that you may not be the same. That does not necessarily mean worse: you may be stronger, better, more resilient. Physiologically and psychologically, however, things are different. As Brett put it, “What was left of me in this ‘new mum’ body?” That’s a bigger struggle for some than others, whether they’re elite athletes or have never tried a parkrun before. It helps to hear women say it’s hard and add some nuance to the ‘you can do this, mum’ narrative.
Osaka says she gives herself “grace”; she gives grace to everyone who has felt that struggle. That’s what makes her post—and her—so brilliant.