Inside Riki Lindhome’s Long Journey to Motherhood: Failed IVF Treatments and a 'Devastating' Loss (Exclusive)

When Wednesday actress Riki Lindhome was 34 in 2013, she was ready to be a mother.

But over the next nine years, she faced an uphill battle as she learned she was in perimenopause and had endometriosis, making the chances of her getting pregnant on her own more difficult.

She first started with her in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment and had her eggs frozen along with donor sperm. She even gave herself hormone injections in the LAX parking lot. “I thought, ‘Oh, this isn’t great. I got one egg from my retrieval, which is not a lot,” says Lindhome, 45, one-half of the folk duo Garfunkel & Oates. That year, she tried two more times. But years later in February 2019, she was ready to start a family with her then-boyfriend. They thought it was best to retrieve new eggs to increase their chances of giving birth. Finally, she thought, it was her time for motherhood.

“I got pregnant naturally, but that pregnancy didn’t last,” Lindhome tells PEOPLE in her studio office in Los Angeles. “I had to terminate it at 13 weeks. The heart was growing in the wrong place with major genetic mutations. It was the longest I was ever pregnant. It was devastating,” she continues, sorrowful. “It was just one of the worst days of my life.”

A week later, she began filming indie thriller The Wolf of Snow Hollow in Utah. “I wanted to get out of my sadness and distract myself. I still had high hormones and was pretty emotional, but it was just nice to focus on something else for two weeks,” she says. “I needed it.”

Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE's free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from juicy celebrity news to compelling human interest stories. 

For the next year, she underwent seven surgeries to fix her uterus after she aborted the pregnancy. "There was just a bunch of stuff that went wrong with [the surgery]," she adds. "The procedure was botched. They didn't get it all out. And then that started me on a surgical journey for a while."

Afterward, the couple tried again to have a child when she was 40. After two more rounds of IVF, she had one embryo to use. But before the implant stage, her boyfriend of two years broke up with her suddenly. “He just came home and changed his mind about having kids,” she admits. “We had just bought a house together. I didn’t see it coming.”

But motherhood couldn’t wait — as quickly as the relationship ended, her next call was to her fertility doctor in March 2020. “I was like ‘I’m ready to use the old eggs,’ ” she said. “I went right into hormones and implanted immediately with donor sperm and my embryos.

"Biologically I didn’t have time to collect myself,” she says. “I didn’t have time to wait.” Sadly, it didn’t take, and she was out of options. “I realized in that moment that I was not going to have a biological child,” she exhales. “It was over.”

But her attempt to have a child didn’t end there. She turned to domestic adoption during the pandemic. “It was really hard being a single mom adopting during Covid. I did get one match, but it ended up not working out. It was a failed adoption, and it was super heartbreaking,” she adds. “The newborn's dad was missing, so they didn’t have his permission, and I would have had to go track him down and risk having to give the baby back, and it just ended up being a fraught situation. I felt awful doing that to someone giving birth, but it just wasn’t a good idea.”

Soon after, Lindhome learned she had health conditions that made it extremely difficult for her to carry a baby. “I got donor eggs and sperm and was going to implant them, but I found out that I had silent endometriosis and perimenopause, which I didn't know. It's hard to detect and difficult to carry a baby. The only symptom I had was infertility. I thought, ‘What am I doing? My body is telling me no.’” But she still hadn’t given up hope.

Lindhome decided to have a child through gestational surrogacy and a donated sperm and egg she picked out online through an agency. She welcomed her son Keaton on March 1, 2022, amid her romance with her friend of 15 years, Saturday Night Live alum Fred Armisen, whom she fell in love with on the Wednesday set in Romania. “It’s not the traditional way to land a man: have a baby by yourself and move to Romania,” says Lindhome. “I told Fred, ‘If you feel in your gut this is not for you, it doesn’t make you a jerk.’”

When Armisen, 57, met Keaton three weeks after his birth, he knew he wanted to be a part of his life. Three months later, Lindhome — who tells her journey to motherhood in her new musical Dead Inside, playing at the Edinburg Festival Fringe Jul. 31 through Aug. 25 — and Armisen secretly got married at a courthouse in Beverly Hills.

“It was insta-family,” Lindhome says. “It was awesome. I was expecting to be a single mom. But things changed. We had the good fortune of having the easiest, calm baby. He turned into an absolutely normal toddler, who likes cars and cleaning,” she laughs. “We just fell in love.”

Before filming, Lindhome had told Armisen about her baby via surrogate. “We started dating a few weeks before the baby was born, it was wild,” she says. The last two months of the shoot, Armisen joined her on set to film. “We were in this foreign country together. My brain was just telling me all sorts of stories. I could tell I was having feelings, but then I was like, ‘Well I can’t say anything. I’m about to have a baby," she remembers.

"And then I thought, 'So? Why aren’t you allowed to say anything? Don’t pre-reject yourself,' " she continues. "And so, I told him that I had feelings for him. I told him I wanted to go on a date,” she says, smiling. “I didn’t know what would happen. I didn’t even know if he was interested. I just knew I wanted to have dinner with him. I wanted to kiss him. It was mutual.”

Three months before their wedding, Lindhome was at the hospital waiting for her son to be born while Armisen was still filming abroad. “I was crying the entire time in the adjoining room when my surrogate was giving birth,” she says. “I was just nervous and scared. She was having a C-section,” she explains. “But my God, when I finally put Keaton on my chest, we bonded. It was amazing.”

Three weeks later in late March 2022, Armisen returned, and they had a heart-to-heart. “I want you to really feel what you feel,” she told him. “Be honest about it because it’s a big, life-altering thing to have a baby. I didn’t want to pressure him. I just told him to tell me what his heart felt, and he said, ‘Yes.’”

The two continued dating and tied the knot three months later on June 1, 2022. “It just felt like luck and timing,” she explains. “I totally think love is luck and now I think it more than ever.” She says it was a natural evolution and didn’t feel that rushed. “It just felt kind of easy,” she adds. “It just felt calm and easy. But I know it’s not a typical relationship story.”

This was Lindhome’s first marriage — something she didn’t ever think she ever wanted to do. She also hated weddings. For her husband, it was his third time getting hitched. “I think we both knew it was going to happen. Then we were like, ‘Well, let’s do this.’ There was no proposal… we picked our rings out together,” she says.

The day before the wedding at the courthouse, Lindhome found a white spring dress at the Glendale mall and Armisen wore a suit. The only guests invited were their son and a friend to witness the ceremony. “I didn’t even tell my mom I was getting married,” she admits. “We didn’t want to get pressured into having a wedding. We told no one. It was just for us.”

Although the two have decided on no more children, Lindhome keeps in touch with her surrogate and is grateful to her for their son. “I had been through so much fertility loss and trauma, I just couldn’t focus on it when I was filming,” she admits. “I couldn’t panic. I didn’t have any control. But I was so removed from it, so I didn’t have to worry. I just let it happen and was able to be calm through the surrogate’s pregnancy while I was away. I needed that.”

She claims the reason she decided to share her fertility journey and create a musical about motherhood — her first song from the show entitled “Don’t Google Mommy” now available on Spotify— is because she wanted to be a voice for women’s healthcare.

“Everything about it… there’s an undertone that it’s your fault,” she says. “But it’s like people who are thinking of adopting, thinking of using a surrogate, women who are doing IVF, people who are using donor eggs — I’ve done it all," she says. "I can give all the pros and cons, and people have found it helpful. It’s why I’m doing this show. This is why I'm being so vocal about stuff. People think women — they’ll reveal that they had a miscarriage, or they are struggling, but we don’t really talk about it. I want to talk about it.”

She continues: “Everyone thinks we are supposed to be perfect and it’s all within our control. See, again, it's society making women believe the narrative ‘It's your fault’ somehow,” she adds. “Even now. Even though we intellectually know it's not, there's still that undercurrent of that. I want to change it.”

Now, Lindhome is ready to share her experiences, help others and close her chapter of fertility trauma. “I’m not ashamed that I wasn’t able to carry a child. I’m sad,” she says. “But I am done with my conception chapter. I’m ready for my Mom chapter,” she adds proudly. “I just feel so lucky.”

For more on Lindhome, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday, or subscribe here.