Lena Dunham and her husband, Luis Felber, are now a family of three.
The couple, who have been married since 2021, welcomed a baby girl via surrogate, the actress and writer revealed in a Vogue op-ed published Wednesday, Sept. 16.
The "Girls" creator and star recounted the emotional surrogacy journey and the anticipation in the months leading up to the birth, which came after over a decade of fertility issues.
Dunham recalled meeting her surrogate less than a year before the woman gave birth, accompanying her to an embryo transfer procedure and getting the positive pregnancy test results days later.
"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," she wrote. "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."
But as the surrogacy progressed, the "Famesick" author admitted not carrying the child sparked feelings of envy.
"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," she wrote. "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."
To cope with the anxiety, feelings of powerlessness and the inability to "feel the physical changes that signal a growing fetus," Dunham said she bought baby clothes.
"Things are just things, and I knew logically that no amount of buying … could prepare me for what was coming," she wrote. "But she was preparing herself, inside our surrogate's strong and healthy body, and as the clothes stacked up in the box, so did some sense that she was becoming real."
She linked the activity to fashion being a source of both bonding and tension between her and her own mother.
She added, "My desire, in these moments, was not to bend her to my will … but to give her options and to offer her something my mother had offered me, and that had lent childhood its most magical moments: the chance to develop her own taste, to curate her world, to express her moods."
The baby arrived 13 days past her due date, "in the face of a solar eclipse and a meteor shower." Dunham, by the surrogate's side during labor, recalled how she greeted her new baby. "'Hello,' I said. 'I'm your mama. 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.'"
Dunham said she hopes that amid the vintage wardrobe the writer curated for her daughter, she finds her own sense of fashion.
"She seemed to fix her gaze on me. Just as someday I hope she will fix her gaze at herself in the mirror, point to her Cacharel dress in muted liberty florals and say, 'Mama, I don't want to wear this today.' Maybe no day," Dunham continued. "They're hers to love or hate, covet or reject. It's all hers now."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'Girls' star Lena Dunham welcomes baby girl after fertility battle
