Mindy Kaling gets honest about working mom guilt: ‘You always feel like you’re missing out’

Mindy Kaling has two huge projects coming up. Her new movie Late Night hits theaters in June and she just announced that she’s working on a comedy for Netflix. Clearly, becoming a mother did not slow Kaling’s career down at all and she’s okay with that—now. In recent interviews, Kaling explains how hard it was to come to terms with balancing work and raising her daughter Katherine, born in late 2017.

Her advice for new moms? Accept that you are enough (and accept help when you need it).

Before Kaling welcomed baby Katherine into the world she thought she would be working less after becoming a mom, but as her current career trajectory indicates, that didn’t happen. “I used to tell myself when I was full-time on The Mindy Project and I was acting all day, ‘Well you know what, I won’t be doing that when I have my daughter. And I’ll feel like I see her all day every day,'” And Kaling thought that would be enough. “But it’s never true. I literally think there’s no world where I would always feel like I bond with her enough and was not shortchanging time with her,” Kaling told the Hollywood Reporter.

“I am seeing her more often, but it’s like unless I was just seeing her 100% of her day, you always feel like you’re missing out. So I kind of wish I had known that. [There’s] a low-key feeling of not being quite adequate enough and being happy with that and thinking, ‘Okay, I’m coming to terms with that,'” Kaling says.

It’s a feeling that we all need to come to terms with, because whether you’re spending time away from your baby because you’re working on a cool new Netflix show or spending time away from them because you’re also raising their siblings, we need to know the hours we are with them are enough, something Kaling is learning and thinks new moms should know.

It took some time for Kaling to recognize that, but she was quicker to recognize that no mama can do it all alone and there will be things she needs to ask for help with as a parent. After Katherine was born Kaling did not become a breastfeeding expert overnight, so she reached out to an expert. “And I actually hired a woman who came over to my house, who’s like the lady in Los Angeles who teaches women how to breastfeed, and she came over and gave me a lesson. So, I really asked for help which was key for me,” she recently told PureWow.

Motherhood changes us, but it doesn’t make us superhuman or infallible. We’re just humans trying to raise other humans and we only have so many hours in the day. We don’t need to spend 100% of our time with our kids to love them with our whole hearts.

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