Mindy Kaling Shares Her Fears About Becoming A Single Mother

On the third episode of Archetypes, a new podcast from Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, actor, writer, and producer Mindy Kaling discussed the stigma of being a “singleton,” both as a single woman in the public eye as well as a single mom to Katherine, 4 and Spencer, 2.

Speaking to Meghan Markle, Kaling said that not being married — something she discusses in her 2015 memoir Why Not Me?, which tackles both her unmarried status as well as her ambition to succeed as a Hollywood creative — is still a subject that can make her emotional, especially in regard to her children not having a father in their lives. She also explained that she had some anxiety about her unorthodox choice of family building insofar as it related to her heritage.

“There’s a whole Indian angle on it too, right,” she told Markle, “I haven’t been to India since [I was] 14, but you start thinking, like, ‘What do my relatives in India think about this? Is this causing tremendous shame upon our family, that I made this decision?’”

At the end of the day, however, she acknowledges that while she could make herself “go crazy” picking apart what other people think, “I have to just live my life to make myself and the people in my immediate family happy.”

And she is, she assures listeners, happy... despite what others might think.

“When you’re a certain age and you’re a single woman at a party, it bums people out,” she told Markle. “You get this feeling like ‘Oh, I’m changing the vibe here because everyone’s worried about me or sad for me’ ... I’m like, ‘I’m OK!’”

Kaling is surrounded by a community of loved ones — including her father and his wife and a live-in nanny — to help raise her kids. And her life is pretty great. “I’m a rich, successful woman with great clothes and a nice family,” she said on the podcast. “I promise you I’m happy and I’m not just saying that.”

While Kaling keeps a lot of her personal life and her kids’ faces out of the public eye, she’s opened up about being a single mom many times since becoming a mother in 2017 and how appreciative she is to have her village to help raise her children. “I wouldn’t be able to keep my full-time professional career and have two children under the age of 3 without the incredibly strong relationship I have with my nanny,” Kaling told People in 2021. “Also with my dad, who comes over to the house at least twice a day to take my son out for walks and to pick up my daughter and bring her home. My village is small and I wish it was bigger.”