Sarai Bareman is in her third week back from maternity leave. Straight on a plane from Zurich to Auckland, then Sydney, and soon back to Auckland. Not so much wrenching herself away from her new normal, more just adding full-time work to the full-time-mother equation. “It’s been an absolute baptism of fire,” she says. “It’s a whole different struggle.”
Of course, her six-month-old boy doesn’t know that. Matthijs was a lovely surprise for Bareman and her husband but, now that she is juggling both him and Fifa’s teams for the 2023 Women’s World Cup, her respect for footballers returning to the field after giving birth has reached the realms of the almost unthinkable.
