Paralympian proves that ‘mom power’ still is golden
All that Lora Webster wanted was a family photo she could use to announce her pregnancy on Instagram.
Instead, she got a snapshot of what it's like to be an athlete mom.
Webster and her husband, Paul, stand in the middle smiling as she points to her belly and he holds up four fingers for Baby No. 4. Their youngest smiles with a thumbs up while their middle child grins, too, but with one thumb up and one thumb down. Their oldest meanwhile grumps on the side, hand on forehead, scowl on face. Funny?
Absolutely.
But it's poignant, too.
Real life isn't always an Olan Mills portrait. It's celebrations and challenges. It's successes and struggles. And when you're a world-class athlete and mother of soon-to-be four like Webster, all of that is magnified.
“Life goes on,” she said with a chuckle, “and we just all gotta deal.”
Safe to say, Webster is dealing quite well.
She is a middle blocker on the U.S. women's sitting volleyball team, which trains at the U.S. Paralympic Training Site at the University of Central Oklahoma, and Saturday in Tokyo, they be
gin pool play at the Paralympics. Webster is competing in her fifth Games — Team USA has medaled each time and is the defending Paralympic champ — and her second Games while pregnant.
She was also expecting during the 2012 Paralympics in London, but unlike her very public announcement of her current pregnancy, she kept that pregnancy secret until after the Games. Didn’t even tell her teammates. Webster believes the conversation about moms competing at the highest levels of sports has changed a lot over the past decade. Even though female athletes have long had children, that part of their life wasn’t always evident. Now, it’s normal to see Serena Williams or Allyson Felix or Skylar Diggins with their children.
“It’s just nice to have it acknowledged,” Webster said. “It’s not like this ‘you can’t be both’ type of thing.” Webster is proof of that.
She became a Paralympian before marrying and starting a family. Diagnosed with bone cancer in her left tibia when she was 11, surgery to remove the cancerous bone took away most of her lower left leg. Even though she wore a prosthetic and played standing volleyball until she graduated high school, she started training heavily for sitting volleyball a year before the 2004 Paralympics.
She made the U.S. team that year and every Paralympics since — and she’s only gotten better.
At the 2016 Paralympics in Rio, she was named best blocker of the Games. And a few years back when USA Volleyball decided to create an award to honor its greatest sitting volleyball players, Webster was the inaugural winner.
Still, getting ready for these Games in Tokyo has been a challenge. The pandemic has limited training camps and international competitions.
“It’s this weird thing where there’s no build up,” Webster said via telephone recently from her home in Point Lookout, New York. “But athletes, we are supposed to thrive with the unexpected, and that’s part of being an athlete and being able to complete is that you don’t know what’s gonna happen and you got to figure it out.”
Adjusting was crucial, too, when Webster found out in the spring she was pregnant.
She and her husband had planned to have another baby after the Rio Games in 2016. But when they had trouble getting pregnant, they sought medical advice. Doctors told Webster her “body had stopped working,” she recalled, but she and Paul knew they weren’t done growing their family.
They decided to adopt.
“We had our paperwork ready to go to file after Tokyo,” Webster said, “and then lo and behold, my body starts working again.”
She chuckled.
“I guess my COVID weight really threw things into gear.”
The timing of the pregnancy was a bit of a surprise, but Webster believes the acceptance of female athletes at all stages of motherhood is higher than ever. She knows the superstar athlete moms like Serena have helped eliminate some stigma, but Webster chalks up part of the change to the pandemic.
Families were locked down together last year, and even though lots of parents worked remotely, the kids were never far away.
“No matter if you’re the CEO of the largest company in the world, you were interrupted by your kids coming into your office,” Webster said.
And if you happened to be on a Zoom call, everyone saw it.
But at the same time, everyone saw that family and work could co-exist. It might not have always been pretty. It might have looked different than it used to. And yet, it could continue.
“It was like, ‘This is what it is, we’re all dealing with it, we’re all doing the best we can, but sometimes you know, I’m going to be wiping my child while I’m on the phone with you. You’re gonna hear it in the background, I’m sorry to tell you, but the toilet’s gonna flush,’” Webster said.
“Work can still be done even when people are multitasking or when we’re managing something else.”
So it is with athlete moms.
Now, just to be clear, Webster is the first to admit she doesn’t do this alone. Help from her husband, family and friends has been crucial — and with athletes’ families not allowed at the Paralympics, assistance at home while she is in Tokyo is even more important.
She was among the athletes who received grants from the Women’s Sports Foundation and Athleta to help with child care costs. Started by Allyson Felix’s “Power of She” program, the money Webster received will allow her mom to take time off work to stay with the grandkids during the Paralympics.
And that will allow Webster to be at her best.
“As a mom, as an athlete,” she said, “it makes a huge difference in my focus when I’m competing knowing that nothing is going to fall through at home.”
Lora Webster knows everything may not be picture perfect. It isn’t when she’s there, and it might not be when she’s gone. But that’s how life goes, and honestly, she wouldn’t change that.
In her eyes, these snapshots she’s gotten along the way have all been beautiful.