“Dancing With the Stars” pro dancers Peta Murgatroyd and Maksim Chmerkovskiy got married in 2017, having welcomed their first baby, Shai, earlier that year. The couple was eager to grow their family, but the road to baby number two wasn’t easy. After struggling with infertility, they were thrilled to welcome their miracle baby this summer.
In a new interview with Yahoo! Life, Murgatroyd and Chmerkovskiy discussed the decision to grow their family. “It wasn’t a discussion — it was just, ‘Yeah, let’s go!’” Chmerkovskiy. “And then, it was hard to do, and it took us some years to get there. People said the adjustment is big, from first to second [child]. We don’t care. We value the moments differently.”
Unfortunately, the couple suffered numerous miscarriages in their attempt to have another baby, something Chmerkovskiy said left him feeling “helpless” in an interview with PEOPLE last year. “It was crazy,” he said. “It makes you feel helpless. And for a dude like me, like all my priorities have completely shifted.”
Murgatroyd suffered her first miscarriage while grocery shopping; her second occurred while Chmerkovskiy was on tour. “I think the darkest part is when the person you are in love with calls you and she says that she had a miscarriage in the bathroom, that’s as dark as it can get,” he said.
Then, while Chmerkovskiy was in Ukraine, Murgatroyd flew to visit him; after returning home to the United States, she tested positive for COVID-19 and was taken to the hospital. That was when they suffered their third miscarriage — almost immediately after learning Murgatroyd was pregnant.
“First, they said that, ‘You’re pregnant,'” he said. “I was like, ‘Well, this whole COVID craziness, the way she got taken to a hospital. I’m in Ukraine on the phone while we have nobody to look after Shai. It was a very difficult situation. But then I heard that we’re pregnant and then the next day I hear we’re not. And it was like, ‘This is crazy.'”
He further added that he was a “changed man” due to their pregnancy losses.
Their pregnancy struggles ended up affecting Shai also. “It was a lot some days,” Murgatroyd said. “Very emotional because I didn’t know what to tell him anymore. I told him the first two times, but I kept it vague. I didn’t make it into this whole, ‘Oh my God, we’re having a baby,’ thing. I just said, ‘Be careful with Mummy’s belly. She has a baby in there.’ I guess that’s been another really hard part of it because he sees other kids with siblings.”
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Secondary infertility, when someone has difficulty conceiving or carrying a child after a successful previous pregnancy, is estimated to affect millions of couples. And for 1 in 5 people struggling with it, there is no discernible cause.
After the miscarriages, the couple then decided to try in-vitro fertilization (IVF). “I didn’t believe we could do this naturally again,” Murgatroyd told Yahoo! Life. “That’s why we went the IVF route.”
It was something she decided to be open about, due to her role in the public eye. “For me, [there] was a little bit of embarrassment, a little bit of shame, all those things that I’ve been bottling up over the past five years or whatever [when] people were constantly asking me every day, ‘Why haven’t you got another child?’ and it was just getting too much,” she said. “And I feel like I just needed to let it out and tell the truth. That actually helped me, just literally saying the words, ‘I’m having trouble. This is not easy for me right now.’”
However, the IVF attempt failed, which she called “devastating.” But by January of this year, she was announcing her miracle pregnancy to the world in a PEOPLE interview.
“I think it was the fastest positive I’ve ever seen in my life,” she said. “It just came up super quick and I was just shocked. It’s been completely different from my past pregnancy. It wasn’t like I jumped for joy and I shouted from the rooftops, ‘Oh my God, I’m pregnant. Yay!’ It was more like a, ‘Okay, well let’s see what happens because I’ve been through this four other times, and it hasn’t worked.’ So I was very skeptical. I didn’t even tell Maks for a while.”
She told PEOPLE that, after the IVF failure, she believes her ability to let go of the stress and fear helped her conceive. “I had called the IVF doctor to start my second round again and I had let it go. As in, I was like, ‘If I’m a one-time mom, if I have one child for the rest of my life, I have to be happy with it,'” she recalled. “I think that was also a catalyst for me, for my body and my mind and my soul to let it go and to move on and not have this harboring feeling inside of me that I needed more. And to just be grateful for what I have.”
Now, everyone in the family is thrilled to have their miracle baby — including Shai.
“He was so excited the day we brought Rio home,” Murgatroyd said. “He was just waiting at the door, like peering out the curtain to see when we were coming. It was so cute.” And it’s made them all more thankful for what they have: a family.
“With Shai, it was stress, stress, stress, ‘let’s do the right thing,’” Chmerkovskiy said. “With the first child, we were looking forward to when he’s gonna talk, when he’s gonna walk, when he’s gonna run, he’s gonna crawl. Now, I’m present. I’m just enjoying the time with a newborn.”
