Candice LeRae Discusses DX's Pregnancy Help And Advice

To the surprise of many, Johnny Gargano and his wife Candice LeRae made their returns to WWE over the past two months. The two came back after taking a year off for the birth of their first child, with the two letting their "NXT" contracts expire to deal with parenthood for the first time.

It's been well documented that Gargano has had a great relationship with both of the men in charge of "NXT" at the time, Paul "Triple H" Levesque and Shawn Michaels. When speaking about the decision both she and her husband made in 2021, LeRae detailed that they went to Michaels and Levesque before they decided to have a kid, telling them about their plan and when the right time would be to do so.

"Of course, they were very supportive. Obviously, we didn't have to let them know but we wanted to keep them in the loop because I felt like I owed it to everybody and didn't want them to be put in a position of, 'Oops, now what do we do?'" LeRae said as a guest on "Out of Character with Ryan Satin." "Hunter even said to me, 'There's never going to be a right time. So you guys got to do what's best for you, and we'll work around it.'"

Having started her career in wrestling 20 years ago, the decision to step away was more than difficult for LeRae, given her age and stage of her career. At the time, LeRae held the "NXT" Women's Tag Team Championship with her stablemate from The Way, Indi Hartwell. Still, she put her career on hold for the birth of her son.

"It's so hard for a woman to figure out, especially when you have your dream job. This is my childhood dream and I'm getting to live it and we want a baby," LeRae said. "I'm not shy about talking about my age, I'm not in my early 20s, I'm in my mid-30s and are these things going to line up? When's the right time? We got to the point where we're like, 'Let's start trying because we never know how long it's going to take and it could take forever and it could just not work and we don't know.'

"We kind of suspected before Great American Bash that we might be pregnant and I said, 'Well, this is a good time.' The day after Great American Bash was when we had a doctor's appointment just to see if we could confirm some suspicions and then within a couple weeks we were basically telling Shawn Michaels and Triple H that I needed to not be doing anything physically for a little bit."

LeRae had her last match at "NXT's" Great American Bash special, where she and Hartwell lost their tag titles to Zoey Stark and Io Shirai. At the time, LeRae thought it could be her last wrestling match ever.

"I will say at Great American Bash because Johnny and I suspected that I would be pregnant, I had this feeling of it possibly being my last match," LeRae said. "That's another thing you didn't know, I didn't know how things are going to play out. I was very fortunate to be alone in the locker room, there was some weird stroke of luck where I was alone in the locker room unlacing my boots and it was this really thing of, 'Oh my gosh, I might be pregnant and this could be it.'

"That was all I had ever known. Time kind of stopped for me and it was very real because for my whole life this is all I wanted to do, all I wanted to be and now this could be it. But holy cow was that kid so well worth everything. I have my childhood dream job and he's still the coolest thing I've ever done in my whole life."

If you use any quotes in this article, please credit "Out of Character with Ryan Satin" with an h/t to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription.