Anouk Hoogendijk enjoys motherhood, but doesn’t see a third child happening. “We wouldn’t survive that,” the forty-year-old former soccer player says frankly in Helden Magazine.
Hoogendijk, mother of four-year-old Sonny and two-year-old Jip, experienced the first years of motherhood as difficult. Both children were born as so-called ‘stargazers’, i.e. with their faces upwards instead of downwards.
It resulted in painful and lengthy recovery periods after her deliveries. “With both deliveries, it took a total of ten months before I no longer lay awake from the pain,” she says.
The former player of the Orange Lionesses and her husband Pieter have been struggling with insomnia for a number of years, because the children don’t want to sleep through the night properly. “Given the hours of sleep I’ve had to do with for four years – about five hours a night and often less – just being a mother is hard enough.”
Although the desire for a third child was once there, she doesn’t currently want to think about expanding the family. “If they slept better and longer, I might have wanted a third. But now I think: we wouldn’t survive that.” Despite the sleepless nights, Hoogendijk hasn’t regretted it for a second. “Apart from the sleeping, they are such fun, lovely children.”
Hoogendijk played professional soccer for Ajax until 2015. On June 17, she will release the book Sleep Mama Sleep. In it, she writes about the insomnia she struggles with as a parent.