When Serena Williams’s time came to give birth to her second daughter, she decided to prepare mentally for the experience. Sharing her experience with Glamour in an interview, the tennis icon, 43, discussed her choice to have a cesarean section for her daughter Adira, now 13 months old.
While she doesn’t regret avoiding natural childbirth, she admitted feeling a bit sad about missing the experience again.
Of giving birth naturally, Williams said, “Looking back, I’ll never have that moment again. For whatever weird reason, that kind of makes me a little sad, but that’s probably a party of one.”
“This time I went in with a plan. I like to say I put my best effort out there, and this was no different,” she said of welcoming daughter Adira. “I literally thought about it as a Grand Slam: ‘How can I succeed?’”
Williams, who shares daughters Adira, 1, and Olympia, 6, with husband Alexis Ohanian, recently celebrated Adira’s first birthday in August.
Expressing her admiration for both daughters on Instagram, she posted throwback photos from a maternity shoot where she and Olympia wore matching pink dresses and smiled in a bed of flowers.
“Olympia is always there for me,” Williams said in her caption. “Before having a second child, I always wondered, ‘how could I love anything as much as I love @olympiaohanian?’”
She continued, “Then Adira came along … she is so special, so fun, so funny, so loving, so sweet and so strong!!! You see, God makes your heart get bigger. Because my love for Olympia has not dimmed. My heart simply now is doubled the size and I have a greater capacity to love more!”
In 2018, Williams revealed in an article she wrote for CNN that she experienced complications following the birth of Olympia, adding that she “almost died” six days after giving birth.
“It began with a pulmonary embolism, which is a condition in which one or more arteries in the lungs becomes blocked by a blood clot. Because of my medical history with this problem, I live in fear of this situation. So, when I fell short of breath, I didn’t wait a second to alert the nurses.
“This sparked a slew of health complications that I am lucky to have survived. First my C-section wound popped open due to the intense coughing I endured as a result of the embolism. I returned to surgery, where the doctors found a large hematoma, a swelling of clotted blood, in my abdomen. And then I returned to the operating room for a procedure that prevents clots from traveling to my lungs. When I finally made it home to my family, I had to spend the first six weeks of motherhood in bed.”
