Lena Dunham is someone’s mother. Literally. Lena Dunham and her husband Luis Felber welcomed a daughter via surrogacy recently. Both Lena and Luis are 40 years old, and Lena has extensively documented her health issues, up to and including a years-long battle with endometriosis and a total hysterectomy at the age of 31. She was never going to be able to carry a child herself, and I remember Lena talking about surrogacy as an option years ago. Well, Lena wrote about her motherhood journey in Vogue – you can read the full piece here. Some excerpts:

Lena was there for the embryo transfer: It was a mild November morning when I found myself kneeling by an exam table, fresh off a red-eye—with a rictus grin of anxious enthusiasm plastered on the lower half of my face while my eyes filled with anxious tears—clutching the hand of a woman I had met in person only twice. While I’ve been known to make friends quickly—​airport terminals, veterinary offices—​this was the quickest leap from first coffee to gynecological procedure I’d ever done. And in that moment, as we watched the ball of cells our doctor had already told us could someday form a girl shooting across the dark ultrasound screen like a UFO on a mission, I had the overwhelming urge to tell her I loved her. Babies and dogs, they’ll coax it out of you fast.

She fought with her mom over the surrogate: Present and forthright, with a mane of impressively obedient curls and the strong, sinewy form of someone who is actually good at yoga, the surrogate had stirred something in me as soon as we were introduced. With my husband out of town, I had brought my mother to meet her and her partner, and we sat in a coffee shop in Cobble Hill holding our matchas like props as we talked— about our lives, her children, the reasons she wanted to undertake this “journey,” as they so love to call it in fertility medicine. After we left, my mother nodded approvingly, then one of us said something I can’t remember and we fought so hard we took separate cabs back into Manhattan. Nothing like staring motherhood in the face, no matter how much you’ve wanted it or for how long, to make you instantly regress into a surly 14-year-​old with the needs of an anxiously attached toddler.

Lena was jealous: In the months before the embryo transfer date, as I got to know our surrogate and to trust her, the feelings I thought would be there somehow weren’t: namely jealousy, that this woman could do for a child—for my child—what I could not. Carry her safely in her body, use her form to feed and house her, regulate the baby’s ever-evolving nervous system with steadiness, heart, and breath. Instead, I felt a different kind of jealousy—toward said baby, for the chance to be tucked into someone who radiated such safety. I could just tell she knew how to steer an SUV in the snow.

What Lena did during the pregnancy: So now, all there was to do was wait. Track milestones, continue calculating, try not to allow ourselves to become too attached to this person who was really just an idea. My husband was better at the waiting, but he hadn’t spent the last 12 years circling the fertility drain, and he offered as many hopeful assurances as he could without making false promises. During this period he did a lot of funny voices for the dogs. Powerless and unable to feel the physical changes that signal a growing fetus, I horrified friends and family who adhere to the Jewish superstition prohibiting anticipatory purchases, and I started shopping.

Lena didn’t know about overdue pregnancies: It had occurred to me she might come early, but it had never occurred to me she would come late. Our Airbnb in a state not our own, just down the road from where our surrogate lives, ran out, and we hadn’t bothered to check if it was booked for the next two weeks (it was, by frat boys on vacation). As we passed her due date, the days became liquid and squishy, too long and without any form. My out-of-office alert went up, seeming to mock my certainty.

The birth: And then, 13 days late, in the face of a solar eclipse and a meteor shower, she announced herself. I sat on a hospital bed, between the legs of a woman I hadn’t known a year ago, waiting for a glimpse of this person who I had been waiting for with something related to patience, but also none at all. I was so focused on our surrogate—in awe at her concentration, her period of quiet followed by what sounded like a roar—I forgot to look down until I heard our baby’s cry. I saw her face, gasping just as she did. Her eyes, wide and unfocused, taking in the light and shadow, blinking rapidly. “Talk to her,” the midwife said. “Say hello.”

Lena’s first words to her baby: “Hello,” I said. “I’m your mama. You…you look nothing like I thought you would, but exactly right. We’ve been waiting for you, do you know that? It was so nice of you to come.” And I meant it. Like a kid who wasn’t sure if their schoolmates would arrive for the birthday party, I was bashful and dizzy with joy.

[From Vogue]

Because Lena wrote this for VOGUE, a huge section of this piece was devoted to Lena compulsively shopping for baby clothes and trying to hunt down the most unique and special baby clothes ever. You get the idea. The confession of jealousy is so on-brand, it hurts. And I say this with all seriousness: I hope motherhood changes Lena for the better and gets her out of her own head. I have a much coarser assessment of Lena, but I’ll say it nicely: she tends to treat everyone in her vicinity as an extension of herself, and that’s a tough way to raise a child.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.