Serena Williams’s New HBO Documentary Sparks the Breastfeeding Conversation We Should All Be Having

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Photo: Courtesy of Serena Williams / @serenawilliams

About a month ago, my husband and I traveled with our two young daughters to visit my father-in-law in Atlanta. My brother-in-law and sister-in-law also made the trip with their newborn, and it was a lovely family weekend filled with cousin bonding, lots of eating, and the inevitable nights of interrupted sleep and early mornings that come when you have three small children sleeping under one less familiar roof. Throughout our stay, my sister-in-law was breastfeeding and pumping. At one point, my 70-year-old father-in-law opened his refrigerator door to find bottles of breastmilk nestled in the side compartment, their Medela shield and valves still in place, and he looked at me perplexed and asked: “What is this?!”

I explained. He was a bit dumbfounded, and the day went on.

Watching episode three of the new HBO documentary series Being Serena, I was reminded of that exchange. This particular installment focuses on Serena Williams’s fairy tale–themed New Orleans wedding to Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, as well as her experience coming to terms with new motherhood (their daughter, Alexis Olympia, was born by emergency C-section two months before Williams walked down the aisle).

In the episode, we see Williams breastfeeding and pumping a lot—it’s all very raw and real and will remind anyone who has been through this experience that, in addition to being awe inspiring, you can, at times, also feel like you’re under house arrest. As the weeks go on, things often get easier, but there are moments when you will inevitably feel very tethered to your baby and/or chained to the machine. The very specific whooshing noise that the pump makes sometimes seems like it could be the soundtrack to maternity leave.

“She’s just having her predinner,” Williams says to her agent, Jill Smoller, of Olympia as she snacks, a statement that a lot of moms will be able to relate to. “She has another dinner later . . .”

But the most groundbreaking aspect of the episode isn’t the footage of the greatest female athlete of all time nursing, her athletic comeback after an arduous birth, or even the previously unreported revelations about her father’s whereabouts on the day of her wedding. What’s really inspirational, and a bit unprecedented, is how Williams talks on camera to the men in her life about what she’s going through when it comes to breastfeeding—and asks them to participate.

This is something that when my father-in-law was a new parent was most likely just not done. The thought back then was that breastfeeding was women’s work. Sure, you could argue that these men have a more vested financial interest in the demands the tennis superstar puts on her body, but I don’t think it matters: In this episode, we see men having to engage with breastfeeding and the hard decisions that go along with it, and we’re here for it.

At one point, during a training session, Williams asks her coach, Patrick Mouratoglou, how long his wife, Ada, breastfed. He says three or four months or maybe six months—he can’t remember exactly, but that’s not the point. The fact that Williams is even having this conversation with him is huge. Later, sitting on the floor, she feeds Olympia while she reveals to Ohanian that she’s second-guessing herself a lot. “My whole fear is that I’m going to hold her and then she’s going to turn to me, and I’m not going to have any milk,” she admits. This is the stuff that keeps new moms awake at night even more than they already are. “It’s going to literally break my heart,” she goes on. “Do you want my heart to break, baby? I just want to be sure of myself, you know; I’m basically drowning myself and putting so much doubt in my mind.” He listens and reassures her that all will be okay. She just needs to let nature run its course.

In the final scenes of the episode, Williams is dressing for a doubles match with her sister Venus. She’s strapped into the kind of bra that allows you to pump hands-free, and while milk is being expressed from her body, she’s suiting up as the Charles Bradley song “Changes” plays in the background. Once she’s done pumping, she pours the milk into storage bottles and puts them in a cooler with an ice pack so that none of what new moms jokingly refer to as “liquid gold” goes to waste. She then steps out onto the court and pulls off a W—it’s a win on the scoreboard, but also a win for women, because with this documentary, Serena Williams has made the struggles around breastfeeding mainstream, and it’s something men will likely tune in for.

Inside Serena Williams’s Fairy-Tale Wedding in New Orleans