Adeline Gray is Creating More Space for Mothers in Wrestling
“I think a lot of women fall away from the sport because they feel like there's not a place in it for us anymore, but there is room for us.”
By: Adeline Gray as told to &Mother
I’ve been wrestling since I was 6 years old. I started representing the United States in international competition toward the end of high school. Since 2012, I’ve won six world championship titles and an Olympic silver medal. For years, I didn’t have much free time but thankfully in the middle of that winning streak, I met my husband. In 2017, we got married after years of doing long distance.
Toward the later part of my career, I was feeling a little burnt out. I wanted a family, I wanted to keep progressing with my life, and this felt like the most awesome step I could take. We talked about starting a family after the wedding. Ultimately, we made the decision to wait because we couldn't figure out how to put the pieces together while still being competitive. So, we pushed off having kids for the next quad, the 4-year period in between the Olympics.
Coming up to the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, our plan was to try and have a baby right after the Games, and then the postponement happened. My whole world imploded because I had this beautiful plan to have a baby right after the Games. With the Olympics getting pushed back a full year, it was really hard to change that mindset with an additional year of training. I just wanted to start this journey of figuring out motherhood and wrestling.
Fitting in family planning is a huge decision to make. Every person on the men's national team has a full family and they're not going through these decisions like we are. It is what it is. But we have to figure out how to create space for women to be successful, not just in college and on the national team, but also into their 20s, 30s, and then the transition into retirement.
Thankfully, we got pregnant quickly with twins after I won gold at the world championships in 2021. They’re nine months old now. Going from training for the Olympics to having this family of four feels so fast, but it's been wonderful. They're healthy and have brought so much joy to my life.
My goal is to be ready for the 2024 Paris Games, and our Olympic Trials procedures begin now. My timeline for return to competition was based on pelvic floor rehab. I met with my pelvic floor specialist all the way through pregnancy. I have some rectus diastasis, which is when the two abdominal muscles are separated, and it didn't heal as much as we were hoping it would. I'm getting back into the swing of things. We're trying to be patient with how much tissue was stretched and figuring out how much I can push each day without being too sore and also knowing when to pull back when we need to. It was grueling to do the same exact exercises while waiting for the body to heal postpartum. It might take longer than I want it to, and I might need to adjust my plan.
It's a lot of balancing expectations and learning how long it takes for my body to be ready to return to competition at an elite stage. It's still a process, and it's something you have to do. You can't ignore it. It takes a lot of brain power and rehab to get your body back to being competitive again, and I'm still trying to figure out how to use that brain power. The intensity is high in wrestling, but balancing that is a challenge that I'm ready to embrace.
It’s also nice to know that I’m not alone in this. There are four women from my weight class who've competed against each other, and we all had babies right after the Olympics. We've chatted on social media and shared stories about our babies and motherhood. All of us have to create a support system that looks very intimate for our situation, whether that be parents being involved, having a stay-at-home dad, or piecing together daycares and nannies. It can be hard to find the right fit for your family. I have a full-time au pair helping me.
Overall, the wrestling community has been very welcoming. Wrestling in general is a blue collar sport and lots of people have families and get excited about this next step. It's been nice to feel that energy. I usually take a year off in a quad. With pregnancy, it will be a full year of carrying the babies plus a full year of recovering and coming back. I'm fighting some of those questions with people wondering, will I be ready in time to be on top again. But I also want to respect the postpartum experience of healing and give myself the time and grace to have that.
USA Wrestling, our sport's governing body, has kept me involved through my pregnancy. I've been coaching, which is great because sometimes all you feel like you're doing is mom and even in the role of mom, sometimes you feel like you're just milk. There's a great network in going to practices and being part of the team.
I feel like there's still space in this environment for me, which has been very important for my mental health. So many people disappear after having babies and rightfully so. I totally understand the germs and the time needed to figure out what you're doing, but I like to figure out how I'm feeling about things by talking to people.
It's good for these women who look up to me and are my friends and peers to see me through this entire process of coming back. I want to show them that babies can be integrated into the world a little bit, whether it's in the warmup, cool down, or part of the core rehab. I’ve fed a baby in coaches meetings. Having them be here is good. It's important to show people that it's doable to have babies around and it takes support. It's important for me to be there in that realm because I think a lot of women fall away from the sport because they feel like there's not a place in it for us anymore, but there is room for us.
I came back to the U.S. Open in Las Vegas, Nevada, on April 28. Before this, my last match was the 2021 world championships. It was 18 months off the mat for me. But I dove right in and finished second.
It feels really good to have such an awesome purpose of being a mom and embracing all the joy my kids give me. It's been really special and I hope it will be rewarding in a different sense when I'm out on the mat and get to show them my hard work. No matter what, win or lose, they're going to be there for me.
