The realities of ‘mum guilt’ for sportswomen

Sam Quek, Hannah Mills and Jo Perkins discuss balancing motherhood with careers in sport on the Telegraph Women’s Sport Podcast

Hannah Mills and her daughter Sienna - Listen: The realities of ‘mum guilt’ for sportswomen
Hannah Mills gave birth to her daughter Sienna last October Credit: C. Gregory

“It is really hard, I’ll be honest. You definitely feel like you’re missing out or you feel guilty for not being there.”

That is Hannah Mills, the most decorated female Olympic sailor of all time, discussing the reality of juggling motherhood with an elite sporting career on the Telegraph Women’s Sport podcast.

Mills gave birth to her daughter Sienna last October and was back on a boat three months later competing for Great Britain in the SailGP event in Singapore. While she is hugely complimentary of the support she received from her team throughout her pregnancy and when returning to action, there is also the mental challenge of being away from Sienna at times.

That ‘mum guilt’ is something podcast host Sam Quek, who won gold in hockey at the Rio Olympics and has two young children, can relate too. She said: “After six weeks I went to a baby group and one of the mums said to me, ‘When are you going back to work?’. I said, ‘I’m going back in about six weeks’ time’. They were like, ‘Oh, so early’. Naturally that guilt comes back on you. But I think you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

“I suffer massively from mum guilt all the time, but I always think I’m the best version of me when I’m busy and I enjoy what I’m doing outside of being a mum. There was a two- or three-week block around Christmas time where I was extremely quiet with work. I just found I was a much happier and more energetic mum, more refreshed, when I was me away from the house doing what I love, meeting new people, speaking to people, to then come back and be the best version of a wife and a mum. It’s being true to yourself.”

Jo Perkins, the head physiotherapist for the Wales women’s rugby team who has a daughter and a son, concurred: “I’m nodding away when you’re talking about the guilt. Obviously I’m not an athlete, I’m looking after the athlete. It’s a constant juggle of that mum guilt. It’s important that we still achieve what makes us, us, but you miss them terribly.

“It’s taken me time to certainly navigate my way through still achieving in my career and still being there and being present as a mum. I’m still learning that for sure.”

As well as the mental impact of juggling sport and motherhood, the trio also discuss the importance of improved guidance for how to physically get active again after giving birth. As Mills said on the podcast: “I definitely had to reach out myself to different people that I’d known from the Olympic world. The EIS (English Institute of Sport) were really supportive, my old physio was really supportive and my GP, and then SailGP, their medical team, were really supportive.

“But I didn’t know that I should be booking in to see a post-pregnancy physio to check the muscles down the middle of your stomach were coming back together. Just all of those things that you need to kind of make sure are getting to a place where you can start to do more and more exercise before you go and do it. Otherwise there’s a big risk of creating more injury and longer term recovery. That whole process, I felt like I had support but I was reaching out myself and trying to figure it out myself a bit as well.”

Perkins specialises in pelvic health and returning to sport post-partum, and she believes there needs to be properly structured programmes as with any injury.

“I think there is pressure to not call them injuries because it somehow takes us away from loving our babies, but they are injuries,” she said. “Whatever birth you have, whether it’s abdominal or vaginal, there are varying degrees of trauma to the abdominals and pelvic floor muscles. We have to respect that process and I say treat it like any other injury. Not only are you doing that but you’re navigating being a new mum. It’s first of all getting back to daily living before we can consider pushing on to sport and being an elite athlete again.

“If you did nothing for six weeks after a hamstring tear and then went straight back out for a run, you’d re-tear it, yet that is what we’re telling women to do post-baby. We talk a lot about bridging sports medicine and pelvic health. For so long they stood separately because of where the pelvic muscles were but they are just like any other muscle and we’ve got to rehabilitate them. Otherwise women are having long-term consequences or even worse, not going back to sport.”

Listen to The Telegraph’s new podcast, The Telegraph Women’s Sport Podcast, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.