Olympic gold medalist Tara Lipinski said she is grateful to welcome a baby daughter via surrogate into her life after battling infertility for years.
The 41-year-old athlete spoke with PEOPLE about what she and husband Todd Kapostasy went through, including multiple miscarriages, before their first child, Georgie, arrived thanks to a surrogate.
“I dreamt about this for so long,” Lipinski said of becoming a mother. “A crying baby, sleepless nights. Even when I’m like, ‘Okay, take an hour nap,’ I’m almost too excited. I’m like, ‘She’s there. Just watch her a little longer.”
She added that it’s “the best tired I’ve ever been.”
Lipinski told the outlet that she battled infertility for five years and had four miscarriages. Her doctors said she would never be able to carry a pregnancy to term. That’s when the athlete decided to use a surrogate.
“The five years were just so grueling and to be quite honest, in the beginning, surrogacy wasn’t something that I wanted,” Lipinski told NBC’s “Today,” saying she wanted to carry her child herself. “We hit obstacle after obstacle. At a certain point, the fourth miscarriage was really traumatizing. And I think I finally gave in to the idea of surrogacy.”
She also discussed the “unfairness” of infertility. “It made me realize that sometimes life is just not fair,” the Olympian told PEOPLE. “For so long I thought, ‘Oh, you get a win, you get a loss, everything evens out.’ As a skater I was able to train harder, force it. But when it came to infertility, there’s things you can’t change.”
Now Lipinski is grateful for the outcome and excited about being a mother. “I feel so much gratitude — it just didn’t happen for so long — and we’re just very, very lucky that this happened for us,” she said through tears while speaking with “Today.”
“I deal with this feeling of, a little guilt for all the people still in that wait, still hearing this news and thinking what I thought for those five years of, ‘When is it going to be my time?’ (and) ‘Why me?'” she continued.
“I just want her to know that she was so wanted,” Lipinski added. “That Todd and I thought about her for five years and that we can’t wait to hopefully be the best parents to her and give her a beautiful life.”
Lipinski and her husband started a podcast, “Tara Lipinski: Unexpecting,” to discuss their journey to parenthood. The athlete became an international star when she brought home an Olympic gold medal for figure skating during the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan. She was just 15 at the time.