Why Serena Williams won’t celebrate her daughter’s birthday
Serena Williams and husband Alexis Ohanian are doting parents to Alexis Jr., but there’s one kind of party they won’t be throwing for her.
Alexis Olympia turns 1 this Saturday and Williams revealed that they have no plans to celebrate it.
“Olympia doesn’t celebrate birthdays,” said Williams during an Aug. 25 press conference on the US Open. “We’re Jehovah’s Witnesses, so we don’t do that.”
Aside from birthdays, Jehovah’s Witnesses also do not celebrate Christmas and Easter because these are not celebrations found in the Bible, according to the official website of Jehovah’s Witnesses. They believe that traditions like birthdays have pagan roots and that is also a reason they do not observe it since they think it will displease God.
But certainly, there are several other ways to party. Little Olympia has quite the charmed life—her mom, after all, is a tennis G.O.A.T. (Greatest of All Time) and her dad the co-founder of the website Reddit. She’s already made it to magazines, snatching her first Vogue cover while only a few months old.
She’s also rubbed elbows with male tennis champ Novak Djokovic—no big deal.
Just the sacrifice that her mom makes to spend time with her while still making it back on top of professional tennis is a gift in itself.
The tennis star recently opened up about struggling as a working mom in an August issue of Time. “I’m really sad. I’ve had meltdowns. It’s been a really tough 11 months.”
Aside from a difficult delivery that involved a pulmonary embolism, she also had to deal with postpartum depression, along with trying to make her way back to the tennis court.
“I didn’t think I’d be this attached,” Williams said of her daughter. “It’s difficult to leave her.” Niña V. Guno /ra
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