THE JOURNAL

In a sport where fewer than 0.5 percent of participants are Black, Ruth Mwandumba never set out to be a trailblazer. She simply fell in love with shooting and committed to mastering it. Yet her presence on the range has quietly challenged long held assumptions about who belongs in elite sport.

Proudly British and Malawian, and now a mother of twins, Ruth’s journey stretches beyond podiums. In this conversation, she reflects on representation, resilience and returning to competition on her own terms.

Like the roots of trees, I hold on to thee, you are the reason I stand tall.

You've always been my reason for living, but I ignorantly allowed the evil of our world to convince me not to gift you life.

A waste of time could be unforgiving.

How could I, a creator, forget that I could create something so amazing as your heart, your mind, & your eyes?

Sad mom since I no longer

Recognise my body

Sad to see me change while he remained the same mom

Sad because there is no village to raise this child

Mad because my mom is so far away

Mad mom too tired to soothe the pain away

Mad coz she let herself get this big

One thing I know for sure, each of these stages will also bring tears, joy, and some grief. But that’s okay because I also know that with it will come a deeper understanding of one another, profound conversations, discovery, and spiritual connectedness. And while I know that I will grieve what was, as we all do, I am also excited about what is to come.

don’t know how your grandmother labored with me. But she mentioned once that she did it naturally which I take to mean, without medication. Giving birth naturally was something I aspired to by taking hypnobirthing, creating a birth plan that involved laboring in water, and hiring a doula. I made the preparations to birth you like your grandmother birthed me, with as few interventions as possible. Perhaps you knew I’d soon forget everything I learned in hypnobirthing and recoil at the sight of the birthing tub.

On September 13, 1998, my son was born, after doctors administered spinal anesthesia, I lay fully naked in a room of strangers, a sterile drape covering my view, my body numb from the breast down to my toes. A white male doctor comes in, and the first thing I remember hearing is "They are getting younger." A hummed consensus filled the room. I felt a push and pull, the sounds of metal and a coldness that skulked into my bones. There was an odd sensation of having someone pulled from your body and briefly shown to you before they were taken away.

What would it mean to bring a child into this world? Into a planet we are failing to protect, into systems we are struggling to fix, into communities that may not survive another generation of exploitation and inequality? I don’t say this with despair—I say it with responsibility.

There were days my dreams of motherhood patiently waited in pews, overshadowed by my mother’s shortcomings. Thought it was inevitable to duplicate the recipes that made me.

I found myself mothering anyway.

Mothering, men who once used the little sense they had to trick me into thinking their mother had mothered them properly.

Mothering, my friends whose mothers didn’t have the knowledge they needed as adults.

Mothering, my cat, because boy, don’t loneliness make you think you need to take care of something.

Loving you so crazy, my God, you smile like the heavens

I know it was no accident they sent me you

Too soon

Right on time

You're divinely aligned

You're all mine

You're sunshine out of rhymes

Everything I have, my mother gave to me.

Maami, the ocean of your body was the first place I existed, even as a shadow of myself. Maami, you split yourself open to bring me here. Maami, in every world that exists you are my genesis. The two of us, tethered by all these irrevocable things.

My mother believes she is not worth writing. That her story is not worth weaving into a journey to be published as a thought. A life is too ordinary, too unremarkable to be shaped into sentences, to be held in print. She urges me to write about my father—his brilliance, his achievements, his efforts, his compassion. And I keep failing to convey to her how much I already embody her story as my own. I see her story as a story of community, where people and places and words and songs, fabrics and jewellery, all spin around her like a long song, stretching across a diary’s pages, full of life, yet buried under the pretext of too mundane.