Lena Dunham Is a Girls Mom

The final season of Girls ended (spoiler) with Hannah Horvath a mother, attempting and, finally, succeeding to get her son to latch. Nearly ten years later, the show’s mastermind and star, Lena Dunham, has a child of her own. Dunham revealed her new baby in an essay for Vogue, detailing the experience of her journey with surrogacy while she was on her book tour and how she became obsessive about new clothes for her daughter. “When had babies — ​girls, particularly — ​become the victims of the cottagecore industrial complex?” she asks in the piece. “Who was announcing that every girl child should look like she was pulling a stool up underneath a cow? And in what world did I want my daughter wearing a garment called a baby bubble that, no matter how adorable the name, was serving the ruffled derrière of a Pussycat Dolls–costume circa 2004?”

Really, the piece is about Dunham’s relationship with what it was like to wait for the baby to arrive. “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,” she writes. “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.” 

By the end, when she finally meets her daughter, Dunham writes about the excitement and thrill of the situation. “Like a kid who wasn’t sure if their schoolmates would arrive for the birthday party, I was bashful and dizzy with joy.” She writes about how the clothing she obsessively bought is now her daughter’s, and how she may someday hate it. Okay, but when is she old enough to watch Girls?