Mindy Kaling opened up about the stigma surrounding unmarried women and single moms, speaking to Meghan Markle about South Asian shame culture in particular.
“There’s a whole Indian angle on it, too, to choose to have your own children by yourself,” Kaling said.
In conversation on Markle’s new podcast “Archetypes,” the actor, writer and director said she hasn’t been back to India since she was 14, but she wonders what her family there might think of her decision to raise two kids on her own.
“You start thinking, like, ‘OK, what do my relatives in India think about this? Is this causing tremendous shame upon our family, that I made this decision?’ I can make myself go crazy if I think too much about those things,” she said on Tuesday's podcast.
Kaling has two kids, a 2-year-old son, Spencer, and a 4-year-old daughter, Katherine. She doesn’t share photos of their faces on social media and she keeps the identity of their father under wraps. She reflected on raising her kids on her own, saying she often wonders how it will shape them as they grow up.
“The idea of like, ‘Why not me? Why am I not the person that got married?’ I think that’s harder to talk about,” Kaling said on the podcast. “I’m still examining it. It makes me emotional . . . I do know that that would be so valuable for my kids, you know, that they have a dad. It wasn’t our lot, our family’s lot in life, and I do think about it with wistfulness and then also fear what will they think when they get older?”
She looked back on a time when she was younger and more insecure, saying she often stayed in relationships because she was scared of being alone.
“I grew up a dark-skinned Indian girl, overweight, glasses, in lily-white suburbs of Boston, never thinking I was attractive. I think a feeling of belonging was if a man deigns to make you their girlfriend … You can’t shake that stuff,” she said. “I am stronger now and more confident.”
So when the time came and she felt ready to have kids, she said she refused to settle on a man to help get her there. She now relies on her family members — her father and stepmom — and a nanny, to help her manage parenting and living her own life.
“I have my community that allows me to have that decision,” she said. “And also, I waited until I was in my late 30s to have children because I knew I needed the resources to be able to do it comfortably, and not everyone has that.”
Confronting the public reaction to her decisions isn’t always easy, she said, but for now, she has far more to focus on.
“I have to just live my life to make myself and the people in my immediate family happy,” she said.
