Women, as it turns out, can have it all.
A gold medal. Two super-cute kids. Killer abs.
Kerri Walsh Jennings showed that to the world this week when she won her third gold medal in beach volleyball with her longtime teammate, Misty May-Treanor.
And we neglected work and kids Thursday to watch the U.S. women’s soccer team, captained by a mother of two, Christie Rampone, take the gold in an epic matchup against Japan.
Hope Anne-Marie Slaughter watched, too. The former State Department official’s essay about how women still can’t have it all generated a firestorm of debate and endless rounds of hand-wringing. Turns out, it just depends on what your definition of “all” is.
Thirteens mothers — you know, the kind of women whose jeans you make fun of, the people y’all roll your eyes at when they dart out of the office at 4:59, the ones who show up at the board meeting with a Barbie sticker on their butts and are associated with the Games only in those schmaltzy Procter & Gamble ads — are members of the U.S. Olympic team.
It’s an astounding number, given not just the social issues of motherhood — child care, school, mommy guilt — but the way pregnancy messes with the very instrument of these athletes’ profession: their bodies.
So much for my excuse about the “baby weight.” These women hit the track, field, pitch and road very quickly after giving birth.
But when you think about it, maybe childbirth and child rearing are the best training there is for Olympic competition.
Endurance: months, even years, of sleeplessness.
Strength: cooking dinner one-armed, with a 37-pound child on your back and a 10-pound infant in the other arm. Every night.
Mental fortitude: “Mommy, are we there yet? Are we there yet? Does God have feet? Why did your iPhone go dark after I put it in the toilet? Do lizards have babysitters? My poop is on the wall! There’s a coffee bean stuck in my nose!”
You need real evidence of the Olympic baby-training program?
Take the case of five-time Olympian Amy Acuff, a world-class high jumper from Texas with a dozen national titles to her name. She thought she might be done after having a baby in her mid-30s.
When she got back to the gym to lose the baby weight, she was amazed at her strength. She picked up a 14-pound medicine ball like it was nothing and breezed through exercises that used to be tough with an eight-pound ball, pre-child, according to a profile on her on the Team U.S.A. Web site.
“My only explanation for that was that I have a 25-pound baby that I do that with all day long,” Acuff said. Within two weeks, she regained her national-level speed.
And Mommy Brain helped with the mental part.
“I think motherhood changes your brain and how you think,” she said. “It allows you to multi-task a lot more and to be able to focus on a lot of things at once. I feel like I am better now in my brain chemistry to be able to not just get narrowly focused and monitor a lot of things. People don’t realize it, but you have to keep track of a lot of stuff in high jump. It’s not only these angles and this rhythm and this tempo and these body positions. Everything has to be dialed in to perfection.”
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