Tara Lipinski may now add “Mom” to her list of achievements.
The Olympic gold medalist, 41, who skated into history at the 1998 Olympics, tells us that she and husband Todd Kapostasy, 40, just welcomed daughter Georgie, who was born via surrogate.
“I’ve been dreaming about this for a long time,” she says on a beautiful afternoon in her living room, as Georgie sleeps nearby. She’s ecstatic about everything that comes with becoming a new mom. “A crying baby and restless nights “Even when I say, ‘Okay, take an hour nap,’ I get a little thrilled. ‘She’s there,’ I say. Just give her a little more time.”
Lipinski continues, “It’s the best tired I’ve ever been.” She and Kapostasy, a producer and director whom she married in 2017, can’t help but reflect on their current happiness, which they worried would never arrive.
Georgie, whom Lipinski describes as “so calm and peaceful,” arrived after a five-year battle with infertility that included numerous traumatic losses. Lipinski felt shattered and alone after all of this until she and Kapostasy debuted their emotional new podcast, Unexpecting, in August. “For so long, I felt invisible and unheard. “I was sick of not sharing,” she explains.
The athlete, who co-hosts NBC Sports with Johnny Weir, says infertility taught her a painful lesson. “It made me realize that sometimes life is just not fair,” she said. “I used to think, ‘Oh, you get a win, you get a loss, everything evens out.'” As a skater, I was able to push myself more. But there are certain factors you can’t control when it comes to infertility.”
Lipinski, who has endometriosis, and Kapostasy discovered a reproductive immunology problem that caused her body to reject their implanted fetus after years of trying. “I went through four pregnancies, four miscarriages, and four D&Cs [dilation and curettage, an often painful procedure to remove pregnancy tissue from the uterine lining],” she said.
“It was like, ‘Okay, Tara, you’ve put your body through enough,'” she says of her latest miscarriage. That’s when I began to consider alternative possibilities.”
She hit it off right away with her surrogate, Mikayla, who became pregnant with one of the couple’s fertilized eggs earlier this year. “I was playing Dave Matthews’ song ‘You and Me’ and I couldn’t stop sobbing during Georgie’s birth.” “Then the baby came out, and it felt so good,” she adds. “I felt like I could breathe again.”
Lipinski’s marriage suffered as a result of her years of battle, but she now recognizes the beauty in it. “It gave us time to figure out how to support each other,” she says of her experience with Kapostasy. “I wish we hadn’t had to go through all of this, but I can’t see life any other way anymore.”