How I Overcame The Pain

The Tennis champion opens up about her struggle with migraines on and off the court—and how being a mum inspired her to seek help

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Serena Williams has triumphed over plenty of tough competition in the two and a half decades she’s dominated on the tennis court, but this spring she faced a challenge that no amount of training could have prepared her for: quarantining at home with a toddler.

“Your natural instinct as a mum is like, ‘I want to protect my kid at all costs.’ You don’t know if you should even step outside, and you’re frightened,” Williams says of her first few weeks of coronavirus lockdown at home in Florida with her husband, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, 37, and their daughter Olympia, who turns 3 next month. “It’s all incredibly stressful.” By day, Williams, 38, was in full mum mode, putting on princess dance parties and baking with Olympia, but at night she’d crash. “I would be so intense with the baby all day long,” she recalls. “And then, almost every night, I would have this long migraine.”