Kim Clijsters: Being both a mother and athlete is a constant battle – Legends’ Voice

What Serena said in her Vogue article resonated with a lot of women. Choosing to expand your family as a professional athlete or deciding when to retire is different for women compared to men. That’s just a fact. I saw that she got some comments about it because she said if I was a man I could have maybe had a career like Tom Brady or something, but I think the people who took it in a negative way don’t realise what it does to a woman when you have a baby. If she didn’t feel the desire to have a family she would have still been playing those two years or year and a half she was out of action. That comparison; it is what it is. My body changed after two, three kids; it’s just a fact. Roger Federer goes through becoming a father differently than his wife would. It’s just a common fact.

People ask me a lot what it takes to win a Grand Slam as a mother on tour. I think now that I’m older, when I think about it and how I won three majors after having my daughter Jada, it comes down to just taking things as they come.

As tennis players, we try to plan or schedule our goals. When you become a mother – and I lost my dad shortly after – it’s such an impactful change in your life. It will have an impact on how you are on the court. Being a mother, being a wife, communicating with my team, with my trainer, with my husband, with our nanny; it became so important to live in the moment. I was always a very disciplined athlete. If I got my weekly schedule and Jada was up all night and I couldn’t do the Thursday morning swim because I was up all night or whatever; I would feel so guilty at the end of the week that I missed that one practice. I had to learn to let go of those things and live in the moment, take it as it comes.

We now see so many women competing on tour as mothers, fellow Belgian Yanina Wickmayer, Taylor Townsend, Tatjana Maria, Victoria Azarenka, Serena… there’s so many and it’s so great to see. The only thing that I wish or hope is that they enjoy their first months to the fullest and not worry about, ‘Oh, I have to try to come back as quickly as possible’.

For me it was so important to communicate and balance my feeling as a mother and as an athlete. Because if the athlete part was overtaking then I felt like I wasn’t the mother that I wanted to be. And then if the mother part was overtaking, which is my priority, then I couldn’t be the athlete that I wanted to be. So it’s that constant battle where you’re shifting back and forth. And you have to have a very understanding team that realises that this is how we’re going to have to deal with it and that we’re going to make the best of it. And sometimes we’ll have to cancel practices because she’s too exhausted; she’s tired. And I think that’s the most important thing that I learned, was to listen even more to my intuition.

When I won the US Open in 2009, I didn’t even go to the tennis on my days off. I stayed in Central Park. I ran the lap, I did footwork drills, I did shoulder exercises, I did little things in the park and that was it. I didn’t even go to the tennis because it was so hectic and so crazy all the time; being there as a mother and the focus and there were cameras and it was just too much and I didn’t want to deal with it. And it was so not normal to take a day off after every match. But it felt right to me because I needed to stay fresh in my head and it worked. Every time I stepped out of court I was so hungry, I was so excited to be out there.

So you just have to understand that my story is different than Tatjana Maria’s, my story is different than Taylor’s and Yanina’s and Serena’s and Vika’s; everybody’s story is different. And you have to find what works for you and where you find peace, because it’s very, very tough to manage both.

Things haven’t necessarily been easy for mothers competing on the WTA Tour. That was one of the first things that I felt wasn’t really right. On the ATP Tour when I used to travel with Lleyton Hewitt, they had a creche (daycare) at every tournament. The wives of the players could drop their kids off and go watch the matches or whatever, which is absolutely fine. But besides the Grand Slams and the combined events, we didn’t have that at WTA tournaments. I was fortunate enough that I had the financial capability of bringing somebody with us so that if my husband Brian and I wanted to go out to dinner or if I wanted to go for a walk with him without our daughter, we were able to do that. If I wanted to have him watch me play for support, he could do that. But there are a lot of players who can’t do that. So I definitely think there’s a huge way forward if we want to support that, if we want our athletes to play longer, to help out in that sense.

After returning to the professional circuit for a second time in 2020, I announced earlier this year I was hanging up my racquets once and for all. There are a lot of things I took away from my recent attempt at coming back to the tour, both good and bad. What stuck with me the most is that the things that I would rely on as a tennis player in the past completely went out the window this time. I was never a player who had to play four or five tournaments in a row. I felt like, okay, once I’m into it, if I’m practising well, if I’m playing good sets or matches, I’m able to very easily transition that onto the match court. There were things that transitioned well, but being out of it for so long, more than seven years, I felt like I need to go play five, six weeks in a row to get myself into that rhythm. And that’s where that balance of me being home with my family and the idea of like, hey, I wouldn’t mind playing 10 to 12 tournaments a year; I wasn’t able to do that. I felt like I got to a decent level and unfortunately the time where I felt I was close to my best was in Indian Wells in 2020. I played a great practice against Kiki Bertens and then we got the news that the tournament was canceled due to the pandemic.

So it’s unfortunate but I don’t have any negative feelings towards it because it was such a fun experience again, and it was with ups and downs. But as a mother, to be able to be challenged outside of your family life is something that I know I will look for no matter what. Sometimes I challenge my laundry room because I feel like the laundry is just piling up and I’m like, okay, I got to make sure that by Friday, everything is clean here. So it’s that challenge you give yourself or making it fun at least.

It’s definitely been a cool ride and I’m so excited because our sport, as women, and in general, we have such an amazing platform to be so global, and to have so much cultural diversity in our sport.

I feel so lucky that I fell in love with this sport when I was five years old and I still love it. I still love to play tennis and it doesn’t have to be on a Centre Court; it can be here in a local public court. It’s still fun to be a part of it. I look forward to going to this US Open and seeing the tournament unfold and seeing how Emma Raducanu will do, and how Serena will do. It’s such an exciting time every time and I feel very lucky to be a part of the sport and hopefully we can help to make it better.

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Kim Clijsters joins the Eurosport team for US Open coverage alongside Mats Wilander, Barbara Schett, Alex Corretja and John McEnroe.