Serena Williams is one of Glamour’s Women of the Year. Serena retired from tennis two years ago, but she’s always busy nowadays. She has multiple businesses, two daughters and a lot of investments and sponsorships. She welcomed her second daughter Adira in August 2023, in what was an easier and less traumatic pregnancy and birth. Serena talks about her pregnancies in this piece, and choosing to have a C-section with Adira. She also talks about Venus (who still hasn’t technically retired) and their mom and a lot more. Some highlights:

On her mother, Oracene Price: “I look at my mom in amazement. She did that five times, and she’s had the horrible experience of losing one of her children,” Williams says, invoking her sister Yetunde Price, who was killed in 2003. “So you know what? You just have to keep your mouth shut and complain to your sisters.”

The sheer logistical realities of childbirth set her teeth on edge. “It’s like, Wait, what is going to happen? That’s going to open? What? I try to tell all my friends that’s normal, and I try to be very open with my experience and the things that people didn’t talk about with me. ‘How is that going to come out of me?’ I know it’s been going on since the beginning of time, but it just doesn’t seem to work.”

She’s so glad she has two daughters: “I mean, I grew up with girls. I’d honestly never been around boys unless I was dating one. And sisters are so special.” She happily admits that she and Venus “are still codependent… Some things never change. I don’t even want to not be codependent with her. I love her. I don’t want our lives to ever be separate…Tennis is so lonely. You’re on the road for 10 or 11 months out of the year. You really rely on having someone else out there. And Venus was there, and who else was going to relate to me? We were successful, and we were Black. We leaned on each other. We lived together. We lived together until a year before I had Olympia, so literally our whole lives.”

Adira’s birth: Williams did not want to take any chances when it came to her second daughter’s arrival. She decided to have a C-section, with four doctors on call. She knew she would not miss experiencing labor, but a part of her still felt a pang. More than most people on the planet, she understands that there can be euphoria on the other side of physical agony. “I have a very high tolerance for pain,” she says. Still, she made her peace with this delivery as she did with the last one. She is—and she knows how this sounds—grateful to have experienced that kind of raw childbirth at all, “because 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. I literally thought about it as a Grand Slam: How can I succeed?”

Olympia already brags about her mom: “The other day Olympia said, ‘My mom is the most famous tennis player in the world. She’s the best to ever play tennis.’ I was like, ‘Who told you that?’” Williams remembers. Certainly Williams and Ohanian never had. She grimaces a little when she tells the story, but then a hint of a grin spreads across her face. “Okay, it made me feel really good,” she says, laughing. “She was so proud.”

She’s still a Jehovah’s Witness: She has a Bible within reach on her desk during our conversation. “It’s the one thing that was able to keep me grounded. Especially with getting famous and wealthy so early, that stuff can really change who you are as a person, and I didn’t want to change….I pray every night that the girls stay close and have a true relationship with God on their own and get to know him. It’s the most important thing that I personally think you can do.” She hopes that in exposing them to faith, she can show them that their extraordinarily blessed existence “isn’t theirs in a way,” she says.

The issues she cares about: “I don’t try to change the world, by no means. That’s not my mission.” But when she sits with her children, she is acutely aware of how unjust it is that so many mothers don’t have the same opportunity. Equal pay and paid leave are issues that both she and Ohanian work to elevate in the public consciousness, and she’s grateful to have a partner who is as loud about their necessity as she is. “When you have men’s voices, it really helps,” she says. “We’ll say something until our faces are blue and we’re out of breath, but when another man says it, men sadly listen.”

[From Glamour]

The part about Serena guilt-tripping herself over her C-section was infuriating to me. Girl, you almost died with your first child! It’s fine to take every precaution! It’s fine to not opt for the most painful and dangerous option! Childbirth is not an Olympic sport! The stuff about her religion is interesting to me because Serena spent her whole career being very apolitical, never endorsing any candidate or policy, and now she doesn’t really know what to say when she does edge up on some kind of “political” issue like paid family leave. I loved the part about Venus and how she wants her daughters to have that.

Covers courtesy of Glamour.