Mindy Kaling on How She Kept Her Second Pregnancy Secret for So Long

Mindy Kaling recently became a mom to 7-week-old Spencer—and she managed to hide her entire pregnancy during quarantine.

The actress, who is also mom to daughter Katherine, 2, revealed in an interview with TODAY earlier this week that the idea came to her after she realized no one could see her baby bump in meetings.

“With him, I would occasionally have meetings. So from here up, I would have to look nice, but I was just kind of like pregnant, and no one saw. And I just thought, ‘What if I could get away with this?’" she told the outlet, adding that welcoming a bundle of joy into the family has been incredibly uplifting during this challenging year.

In terms of how little Katherine took the news, Kaling said initially she struggled with the idea. “She was very suspicious and worried about him at the beginning,” Kaling said. “Because I think in her mind, she thought that he would come out as a 2-year-old. She kept saying like, ‘I’m really worried about my toys.’ And then when she saw that he was just like this helpless, little, adorable blob, but like not that interested in toys at all, she’s like, 'Oh, I love this guy.’”

Kaling continued to say that she hasn’t felt herself change since becoming a mom all that much, though she has become a little more religious. “I imagined that with motherhood, that somehow my personality would completely change, that I would become this incredibly maternal person who did all these other things. I’ve actually found that I didn’t change, but somehow, like, just my heart expanded a little bit,” she told the outlet, adding, "I would go to religious functions, but I felt pretty secular, and it wasn’t until I had my daughter, and my mother who passed, that I found that my faith felt like something that bonded all of our generations together because of the rituals we do.”