The road to motherhood was fraught for Kristen Wiig. She sat down with InStyle and opened up about the physical and emotional maze she navigated with fiancé Avi Rothman before welcoming twins, who are now 9 months old, via surrogate.
The 46-year-old told InStyle: “We've been together for about five years, and three of them were spent in an in vitro fertilization haze. Emotionally, spiritually and medically, it was probably the most difficult time in my life. I wasn't myself. There are so many emotions that go with it — you're always waiting by the phone and getting test results, and it was just bad news after bad news. Occasionally there would be a good month, but then it was just more bad news. There was a lot of stress and heartache.”
Wiig added: “It was a long f—ing time. It got to the point where I just kind of stopped talking about it entirely, because I would get sad whenever someone asked. It was just part of my life. I gave myself hormone shots in airplane bathrooms and at restaurants — and those shots are no joke.”
Wiig said that talking to others, when she was ready to, helped: “But when I did talk about it, every time I said that I was going through IVF, I would meet someone who was either going through it, about to go through it or had a friend who just did it. It's like this underground community that's talked about but not talked about.”
When her doctor broached the subject of surrogacy, Wiig was resistant: “I remember when our doctor mentioned going other routes and I was just like, 'Nope. Don't ever bring that up again. I'm getting pregnant. I'm doing this.’ I finally realized that I just needed help. And, thank God, we found the most amazing surrogate.”
Now, she couldn’t imagine coming to motherhood any other way: “I've always believed that things happen the way they're supposed to happen, and this is how our babies were supposed to get here. I became really close with our surrogate, and it was her first time doing it so we kind of went through everything together. When the children were born, I wanted to make sure she was okay and she wanted to make sure I was okay.”
