Advertisement

Single mom Mindy Kaling quietly gave birth to a second baby during the pandemic

Mindy Kaling
“I’m telling it for the first time now,” Mindy Kaling said Thursday night of the birth of her second child.
(Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times)
Share

The latest “Mindy Project,” it seems, is a second secret baby.

“The Mindy Project” creator and actress Mindy Kaling announced her second child, Spencer, on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” Thursday night.

“I’m telling it for the first time now, it feels so strange, but I gave birth to a baby boy on Sept. 3,” Kaling told Colbert. “This is news to a lot of people.”

Advertisement

News indeed. Although Kaling gave birth more than a month ago, this was the first time the public learned of Spencer’s existence.

We were all Stephen Colbert when he exclaimed, “No one even knew you were pregnant!”

In 2017, Kaling surprised the world with her daughter, Kit, now 2 ½. Kit, Kaling told Colbert, wasn’t so sure about Spencer at the beginning.

“She was very ambivalent at first, to be generous,” Kaling said. “She was really worried about her toys getting taken. And so, that happened and I think in her mind, because she’s 2 ½, almost 3, she thought that it would be another child that was her same size.”

“She was delighted when he arrived home with me from the hospital and he was just a blob who couldn’t take her toys. She’s a huge fan now that she’s met him.”

Kit’s arrival also received the surprise star treatment — that time, announced by Kaling’s “A Wrinkle in Time” costar Oprah Winfrey.

Advertisement

Winfrey accidentally spilled the beans about the baby to People in July 2017. Kaling quietly let the talk show host in on the secret as the pair tackled the movie’s press line together at Disney’s D23 expo.

Near the end of Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time,” a character compares life to a sonnet — a work governed by strict patterns of rhyme and rhythm, but one that allows for complete creative freedom within those limitations.

March 7, 2018


“My mouth dropped,” Winfrey told People. “‘What did you just say?’ she said, ‘Oh, Oprah, I don’t think you know. I’m five months pregnant.’”

“And I said, ‘WHAAAAT?!’ That was it, and we just kept smiling. And then I said to [Reese Witherspoon], ‘Did you know?’ and she said, ‘I just found out too.’ And then I said to [Ava DuVernay], ‘Did you know?’ And she said, ‘I just found out.’”

Never have we ever heard something quite so on-brand for the A-lister. After all, her character’s love interest in “The Office,” B.J. Novak, is the godfather to both of her children. (Although some fans had hoped he might be the father.)

In fact, Kaling is a working, single mother, and she chose not to tell even her close friends the identity of Kit’s father. Her new essay collection, “Nothing Like I Had Imagined (Except for Sometimes),” revolves largely around parenthood.

Advertisement

Critic Lorraine Ali writes of seeing her immigrant upbringing in the San Fernando Valley reflected in the Mindy Kaling Netflix comedy ‘Never Have I Ever.’

May 6, 2020

“I have a child who will never know her grandmother, the person who was the closest to me in the world,” Kaling wrote of Kit. “And I was about to start this journey with my daughter by myself.” (Kaling’s mother died of pancreatic cancer in 2012, on the same day that Fox picked up “The Mindy Project.”)

Through her characteristic blend of wit and wisdom, Kaling writes about the ins and outs of single parenthood.

“In Los Angeles, if you tell people you give your baby formula,” Kaling joked in the new book, “they look at you like you just said you force-feed her Sprite through a beer bong.”

Advertisement