Renée Elise Goldsberry Opens Up About 5 Pregnancy Losses (Exclusive)

Renée Elise Goldsberry is opening up about her journey to motherhood. 

When thinking about creating her new documentary, Satisfied, out Sept. 30, the Hamilton star says a driving factor was the opportunity to share her “family story” in tandem with her remarkable career on Broadway. 

Dating back to before Hamilton, Goldsberry was cast as the final actress to play Mimi in Rent on Broadway before the show’s close in September 2008. At the time, she and her husband Alexis Johnson, had been trying for a baby.

Ahead of the cast’s final performance, Goldsberry took a trip to the bathroom and noticed she’d started bleeding, thinking her period had just started. 

“I literally sat in the toilet and am like ‘Really, God? Really?,’ ” she says in the documentary. 

As it turned out, the bleeding was a sign of something else completely. 

“In the middle of this most stressful closing performance of Rent, the bleeding stopped,” she remembers now, more than 15 years later.  “[In the] back of my head, I know that there’s something called implantation bleeding which is like a spotting that happens when, you know, this little thing is like traveling through your uterus and it implants… so I thought in the back of my head ‘Mmm, am I pregnant?’ but then I just put it out of my head.”

She went home following the “triumphantly beautiful, emotional night” and took a pregnancy test, discovering she was pregnant with her son Benjamin.

“While I was hanging upside down at the Nederlander Theatre, pregnancy number six,” she says, tearing up. “That kid held on. Halleluja,h that kid held on.” 

Goldsberry tells PEOPLE that her son, now 16-years-old, was a “dream come true” and that she hopes telling her story about his arrival, helps to show that “the timing is never what we expect and always right on time.”

“I didn’t know that this would happen for me,” she says. “There were so many missed opportunities, there were so many miscarriages. I was trying to get very comfortable with the idea that maybe I would not have a family in that way and I had to figure out how I was going to have a family — and there are so many ways to have a family — I was just trying to open my heart up to other ways it could look. And then, Benjamin.”

In the film, she talks about the anger she used to feel when people around her would say that if she only slowed down her schedule to “rest,” she’d be able to have a child. 

And of course, for Goldsberry, it was quite the opposite: “I needed my body to be as taxed as possible, which is so counterintuitive.”

Years after welcoming Benjamin, Goldsberry and her husband welcomed their second child, a daughter named Brielle, through adoption in 2014. 

“I just said to my son yesterday…’You’re a miracle and all children are a miracle, but I have documented proof that you’re a miracle,’ ” she tells PEOPLE.  “And I say it to my daughter who’s 12 now, ‘You’re a miracle in a whole other way.’ And that is a universal experience that everybody has that has a family in any iteration.”

Satisfied is out in theaters nationwide for a limited time from Sept. 30 through Oct. 2.