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.

Bianca’s journey into motherhood came just as the world was about to pause.

Two days before the UK went into lockdown, she welcomed her son, Zuri, into a life that had been meticulously structured around training for the Olympics.

In this conversation, she reflects on the surprises of pregnancy, the unexpected solitude of early motherhood, and the challenges of returning to elite running without the support she had counted on.