“I knew on some level that’s not what you sort of build a life, a family on,” she continues, acknowledging the immense pressure women are under to marry and have children after a certain age.

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“You probably know the friends… the desperation in your friends when they’re in their late thirties and they’re like, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know.’ And they’re just like, ‘whoever I’m with, I just, that’s the person I want to marry.’ And I didn’t want to do that.”

Kaling also acknowledges her level of privilege that allows her to be a single parent. “I have my community that allows me to have that decision. And also, I waited until I was in my late thirties to have children because I knew I needed the resources to be able to do it comfortably. And not everyone has those abilities.”

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, there were 1.1 million single-parent families in June 2021, with 79.8 per cent of these being single mothers.

Being a single mother “has some negative connotations,” says Terese Edwards, CEO of the National Council of Single Mothers and their Children, herself a single mother to a 22-year-old son.

Reflecting on the prejudice she’s faced due to being a single mother, and that she’s heard other single mothers face, she adds: “Quite a few years ago, a failed One Nation candidate said about single mothers, ‘They’re too fat and lazy to keep their partner, and that’s why they’re single’.”

She added that class issues often affect how a single mother sees herself. If a single mother is poor and needs to access social security payments to get by, she is often apologetic about her status, because she’s aware of the judgement society heaps on her, says Edwards. “The first thing they will say is, ‘Oh, I’m a single mother, but I’ve worked really hard, I study, I’m really good’.” Whereas middle-class women, she says, often present their single motherhood status as a “badge”.

Recently attending a job skills summit, Edwards says, “a couple of speakers spoke about their journey, and where they got to, and they used ‘I’m a single mother’, [as a way] of letting the crowd know that behind all of the outwardly professional work, they were managing and juggling everything behind, and that was really said as a statement.”

Other celebrities have spoken out in recent years about their choice to become a single mother.

Diane Keaton adopted two children in her 50s, saying that having children was “a thought I’d been thinking for a very long time,” and yet “those good relationships that are strong and substantive never happened”.

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In July 2021, actor Amber Heard announced on Instagram the birth of daughter Oonagh, who she had decided to have alone. “I now appreciate how radical it is for us as women to think about one of the most fundamental parts of our destinies in this way. I hope we arrive at a point in which it’s normalised to not want a ring in order to have a crib.”

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