The turn of the year saw two weddings of soccer royalty, each offering a different look at marriage and parenthood. Sam Kerr and Kristie Mewis’s baby was part of their ceremony, while Marta and Carrie Lawrence might have a baby in their future. There are lessons for all of us in their two paths.
Sam Kerr and Kristie Mewis
Kerr, widely considered one of the best players in the world, is captain of the Australian Women’s National Team and plays for Chelsea in the U.K. Women’s Super League (WSL). Mewis, a member of the U.S. Women’s National Team, also plays for the WSL’s West Ham United. Both women have also been members of the U.S. National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL). (If you think Heated Rivalry was the first queer rivals-to-lovers sports story, you haven’t been paying attention.) Kerr and Mewis welcomed their baby last May, and the two women wed on New Year’s Eve (with the party carrying on into the new year) in Swan Valley, Australia.
A video posted to their Instagram feed yesterday shows Kerr and her father walking down the aisle, as her father holds baby Jagger. You can see a still of this in the photoshoot from Vogue Australia. A photo from the Daily Mail has another photo of the day, with Kerr carrying a baby bottle, clearly still on parenting duty even during the chic event. I love all of this.
Little Jagger Mewis-Kerr is also starring with Kerr in a sponsored post for Bonds Baby and Kids, which I mention not to promote the products (it’s an Australian brand that I’m not familiar with), but simply to say it’s cool when brands reach out to queer families as endorsers—assuming their policies and actions match their marketing, of course. (They’re hardly the first brand to reach out to queer families, either. Among others, Samsung Canada recently did a sponsored post with PWHL player Jamie Lee Rattray, her spouse Whitney, and their baby; and Cox Communications did one with WNBA legend Diana Taurasi, spouse Penny Taylor, and their two kids in 2024.) I wish Mewis was in the Bonds spot, too, for more definitive visibility of a queer family, but we shouldn’t presume to know the reasons here; it could simply be that she was unavailable at the time—and I think it’s probably a rare Australian who doesn’t know that Aussie legend Kerr and Mewis are together. Let’s hope Mewis is part of a future spot, though.)
Marta and Carrie Lawrence
Marta (known mononymously), a Brazilian national team player and sometime captain who also plays for the NWSL’s Orlando Pride, is considered one of the game’s greatest players ever. She has won the international FIFA Player of the Year award six times, more than anyone else in the women’s game and second only to Lionel Messi overall; FIFA even named another award after her, with the annual FIFA Marta Award recognizing “the best goal in women’s football.” Lawrence played with the Pride from 2020 until her retirement in 2024. The couple shared photos of their January 2nd Florida wedding on Instagram:
In 2024, Marta told FIFA.com, “The most recent thing I’ve started to talk about—and something that I’ve wanted for a long time—is to become a mother. I don’t know how long I’ll carry on playing—I don’t want to say one or two years, but I would absolutely love to end my career as a mother.”
Last July, when discussing her future with Globo’s Esporte Espetacular, Marta said, “It’s too early to say that I’m definitely going to play [in the 2027 Women’s World Cup]. I still have a very strong desire to be a mother. So, I might wake up one day and decide to call my doctor to see if it’s still possible. If it is, then bye, I have to go,” Reuters reported.
Presumably Lawrence is on board with becoming a mother, too. While Marta’s statements seem to conflict a bit on whether she would still be playing or not before becoming a parent, everyone’s entitled to shift their plans as life unfolds. I hope she and Lawrence do it in their own time and their own way. Certainly, it’s increasingly possible to balance parenthood and an elite sports career, though Marta, at 39, is likely to be retiring soon in any case. (She actually announced her retirement from international football in 2024, but came back to represent Brazil in the 2025 Copa América Femenina.)
Different Paths
Each couple did things in a different sequence, Mewis and Kerr starting with parenthood and then a wedding; Marta and Lawrence marrying first. I’m not going to speculate on why each did so that way, only to say that it was their choice and I’m glad they had it. It used to be that many queer parents (including myself) became parents before marriage because they weren’t allowed to marry at the time they had kids. (Let’s remember that out queer parents had been intentionally having kids for decades before marriage equality.)
Now, LGBTQ folks, like anyone, can choose to marry or not. If we choose to, and if we also want to become parents, we can also often pick the timing of the two events that makes sense for us, balancing inputs like fertility, donor or surrogate availability, careers, proximity of extended family and friends, financial situation, need for the protections of marriage, and more. I should note that while it has become common to say that LGBTQ folks never have “accidental” children, that’s just not true, with more than half of LGBTQ parents of minors partnered with a different gender, cisgender person, according to one study, as well as some trans people able to conceive with their partners. But accidents aside, we can choose the timing that works for us. (Married or not, though, make sure to secure your parentage.)
My very best wishes to Kerr, Mewis, Marta, and Lawrence in their relationships, parenthood, and pursuit thereof, and my thanks to them for sharing a little bit of their family joy with the world.