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Serena Williams shared some new pictures of her eldest daughter — and she’s all grown up! “At first they are sweet, then they get sweeter… Or something like that,” Williams, 44, wrote via Instagram on Thursday, October 30, alongside a carousel of current and seemingly throwback photos of Olympia, 8. (Williams also shares daughter Adira, 2, with husband Alexis Ohanian.) In the snaps, Williams posed with Olympia on a couch as they crossed their arms and looked at each other. In other pics, a younger Olympia could be seen sitting in an airport security bin and near the ocean while seemingly on vacation. Another more recent photo shows her smiling on a boat. “Dear Daughter, I hope you can always hear my voice saying ‘you’ve got this’ when the world feels too loud. Love, Mom,” Williams shared on the last slide. Williams has been open about how motherhood shifted her lifestyle. In an essay for Vogue in 2022, the Golden Slam champion announced her retirement from tennis to focus on being a mom. “Believe me, I never wanted to have to choose between tennis and a family. I don’t think it’s fair. If I were a guy, I wouldn’t be writing this because I’d be out there playing and winning while my wife was doing the physical labor of expanding our family,” she wrote. “Maybe I’d be more of a Tom Brady if I had that opportunity. Don’t get me wrong: I love being a woman, and I loved every second of being pregnant with Olympia. I was one of those annoying women who adored being pregnant and was working until the day I had to report to the hospital—although things got super complicated on the other side. And I almost did do the impossible: A lot of people don’t realize that I was two months pregnant when I won the Australian Open in 2017. But I’m turning 41 this month, and something’s got to give.” Williams went on to say that she cries thinking about the word retirement and prefers a different term. “Maybe the best word to describe what I’m up to is evolution. I’m here to tell you that I’m evolving away from tennis, toward other things that are important to me,” she said. She continued, “There is no happiness in this topic for me. I know it’s not the usual thing to say, but I feel a great deal of pain. It’s the hardest thing that I could ever imagine. I hate it. I hate that I have to be at this crossroads. I keep saying to myself, I wish it could be easy for me, but it’s not. I’m torn: I don’t want it to be over, but at the same time I’m ready for what’s next.” Williams went on to welcome Adira with Ohanian, 42, in August 2023 and has since been focused on her children and her business ventures — including her investment firm, Serena Ventures, beauty line Wyn and production company Nine Two Six. “Tennis is [played] every day, you have to do it every day. You have to train, and business is the same,” Williams told CNBC Make It in June. “It is exactly the same. You have to be very disciplined. You also have to be determined through ups and downs, be determined to keep going.” Williams has also made the time to workout, travel and show off her fabulous sense of style — but her family comes first. “Just a mom trying to take a picture but I keep getting photobombed,” she shared via Instagram earlier this month as Adira stood behind her. In another Instagram post in August 2024, Williams shared, “God makes your heart get bigger. Because my love for Olympia has not dimmed. My heart simply now is double the size and I have a greater capacity to love more!”
