Parenting & Family Quote by Gabriela Sabatini

Sabatini’s line lands with the blunt clarity you hear from someone who spent her youth on other people’s schedules. She isn’t rejecting motherhood; she’s pricing it honestly. “I want children” nods to the culturally expected endpoint for women, especially public ones. The turn that follows - “but at the moment” - is the quiet revolt: desire, yes, but not on demand, not as a tidy post-career milestone.

The word doing the heavy lifting is “liberty.” Not freedom in the abstract, but the hard-won kind that arrives when the tour calendar stops dictating your meals, your body, your sleep, your geography. For an elite athlete, autonomy is rarely a birthright; it’s a late-stage reward. Sabatini’s “finally” signals a history of managed time and managed self, where even success comes with surveillance: coaches, sponsors, media, federations, fans. She’s describing a life where choice was often outsourced.

“Has a far too high value” reads almost like a business assessment, and that’s the point. Motherhood is routinely framed as priceless, instinctive, beyond calculation. Sabatini reframes it as a trade-off with real opportunity cost: travel without negotiation, solitude without guilt, a personal life not structured around caregiving. The subtext isn’t selfishness; it’s a refusal to treat women’s time as infinitely elastic.

In a culture that loves the redemption arc of the athlete who “settles down,” Sabatini offers something more contemporary: adulthood as self-authorship. She’s not postponing life. She’s protecting the part of it she was never fully allowed to own.