After nine years of battling fertility issues, "Wednesday" actress Riki Lindhome has welcomed a baby via surrogate and is now raising the child with her husband, Fred Armisen.
In 2013, at 34, Lindhome was ready to become a mother. However, the journey proved difficult as she discovered she was in perimenopause and had endometriosis, making natural conception challenging.
Lindhome began in vitro fertilization (IVF), freezing her eggs and using donor sperm. Despite multiple attempts and hormone injections, she only managed to retrieve one egg each time. In 2019, she became pregnant naturally but had to terminate the pregnancy at 13 weeks due to severe genetic mutations. "It was devastating," Lindhome recalls. "It was just one of the worst days of my life."
Following this loss, she threw herself into work, filming the indie thriller "The Wolf of Snow Hollow" in Utah. However, the journey to motherhood was far from over. She underwent seven surgeries to fix complications from the termination and continued with IVF. When she was 40, her relationship ended suddenly, just before she could use her last viable embryo.
Determined to become a mother, Lindhome turned to her fertility doctor in March 2020, but another round of IVF failed. Accepting that she wouldn't have a biological child, she explored adoption, but the pandemic made it difficult. "It was really hard being a single mom adopting during Covid," she shares, recounting a failed adoption due to missing parental consent.
Eventually, Lindhome decided on gestational surrogacy using donor eggs and sperm. She welcomed her son Keaton on March 1, 2022, amid her blossoming romance with her longtime friend, "Saturday Night Live" alum Fred Armisen. "It’s not the traditional way to land a man: have a baby by yourself and move to Romania," Lindhome jokes. But Armisen embraced the situation, meeting Keaton three weeks after his birth and committing to their new family.
The couple secretly married at a Beverly Hills courthouse in June 2022. "It was insta-family," Lindhome says. "I was expecting to be a single mom, but things changed. We had the good fortune of having the easiest, calmest baby."
Despite the unconventional start, their relationship flourished. "We started dating a few weeks before the baby was born, it was wild," Lindhome recalls. She confessed her feelings to Armisen, and they began dating while on set together.
Lindhome’s journey to motherhood has been filled with challenges, but she’s ready to share her story through her new musical "Dead Inside", premiering at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. "I want to be a voice for women’s healthcare," she says. "People think women— they’ll reveal they had a miscarriage or they are struggling, but we don’t really talk about it. I want to talk about it."
Reflecting on her experiences, Lindhome says, "I’m not ashamed that I wasn’t able to carry a child. I’m sad, but I am done with my conception chapter. I’m ready for my Mom chapter. I just feel so lucky."
The Quran - Chapter Al-Mumtahanah: 12
O Prophet! When the believing women come to you, pledging to you that they will neither associate anything with Allah ˹in worship˺, nor steal, nor fornicate, nor kill their children, nor falsely attribute ˹illegitimate˺ children to their husbands,1 nor disobey you in what is right, then accept their pledge, and ask Allah to forgive them. Surely Allah is All-Forgiving, Most Merciful.
