Paralympian Mallory Weggemann on IVF, Postpartum Mental Health, and Paris Prep as a New Mom

glamour.com:

. But it wasn't because the competitive swimmer stopped loving what she did; the new mom felt “stuck" and forced to choose between and career athlete."It felt like the expectation was that I would silo those two identities—athlete and mother—and break them apart," Weggemann tells Glamour. “I didn't feel like there was a path forward that showed how this could work.

We're still learning; more women are competing through motherhood and athletics, but we still don't have an abundance of representation showing us how."Fortunately, if Weggemann knows anything, it's overcoming adversity—as well as her way around a pool.

Weggemann didn't retire. In fact, the 35-year-old qualified for her fourth —and did so just fifteen months after giving birth to her daughter Charlotte.“I have a whole new appreciation for what my body is capable of,” she says of the momentous feat. “Watching everything my body did through that season—going through IVF, pregnancy, competing at 26 weeks pregnant at Nationals, training as much as I could throughout, postpartum, and all that comes with healing —I look back and I see all the ways that my body served me over the past two and a half years and it's remarkable.”Courtesy of Mallory WeggemannFor anyone familiar with Weggemann's story, this perseverance comes as no surprise.

After a routine medical procedure left Weggemann paralyzed from the waist down at 18, she dedicated her life to competitive swimming and sharing own “watershed” moments and story to help others move through theirs.Most recently, that came in the form of a deeply personal documentary, aptly titled , which chronicles Weggemann's journey through the postponed Tokyo Paralympics, infertility, and .