Why Mindy Kaling Won't Show Her Kids' Faces—Plus, Everything Else You'll Want to Know About This Sweet Family of 3!
Mindy Kaling is the secretive mastermind we never knew we needed. Unlike her Office character Kelly Kapoor, who faked a pregnancy, Kaling kept her second pregnancy completely under wraps. The Mindy Project alum just revealed she secretly welcomed her son Spencer in September of 2020. The actress' baby boy joined her daughter Katherine, whom she previously told Parade.com "is my true joy." Well, that joy has since doubled!
Despite the happiness that has come with her children, the Hollywood star has candidly spoken out about being a single parent. In her Amazon collection of essays Nothing Like I Imagined (Except for Sometimes), Kaling wrote that being a single mom is “really complicated.”
“Being single, and being a single mom, is really complicated. Sometimes it’s the most liberating and lucky feeling in the world. Sometimes I am just so grateful to be an independent woman doing what I want, when I want, that I could cry with gratitude," she penned. "I can’t believe the sh-t my married female friends have to put up with. But other times I could cry because I can't believe I’m not in the kind of stable and happy marriage that my parents had. Either way, there’s a lot of crying.”
Kaling added, “For the record, I don’t hate husbands. I actually love husbands in theory; I just don’t have one"...and she's proven she doesn't need one!
Although the writer admittedly "wasn't ready" to have kids, she's now basking in motherhood. "I’m surprised at how much I enjoy being a mom," she previously confessed to The New York Times. "I did not think I had a big maternal instinct. I’m very impatient, and having a baby requires an amount of patience that I was worried about. But they don’t tell you that the thing will look so much like you, and do things that are so sweet and adorable, that you’ll naturally not have the same impatience that you would have with a stranger or someone who works for you."
Here is everything we know about Mindy Kaling's kids, her daughter and new baby son!
How many kids does Mindy Kaling have?
Kaling is a proud mother of two children.
When is Mindy Kaling's daughter's birthday?
Kaling welcomed her first child, daughter Katherine, December 15, 2017.
When is Mindy Kaling's son's birthday?
The actress' son Spencer was born September 3, 2020 during quarantine.
Who is Mindy Kaling's baby daddy?
Since Katherine's birth in 2017, Kaling has kept the identity of her daughter's father a secret. In 2019, she explained to TheNew York Times, “My feeling is that until I speak to my daughter about that, I’m not going to talk to anyone else about it."
The special role B.J. Novak has in Mindy Kaling's daughter's life
Fans have speculated whether Kaling's former boyfriend B.J. Novak is Katherine's father. “If I was on the outside looking at it, I would think the same thing,” she told GoodHousekeeping.com.
While Novak might not be Kaling's baby daddy, he does hold a special role. “The truth is that B.J. is so much more like family now than a platonic friend. He’s the godfather to my daughter, he comes over like once a week. Sometimes he’ll come over just to hang out with her," she said. "When you’ve known someone for as long as I’ve known him — the time that we met each other, which was like 24. Now, we’re both almost 40. It’s such a long time that he truly is just a part of my family.”
Why does Mindy Kaling keep her kids out of the spotlight?
Although Kaling is active on social media, she rarely posts photos of her daughter. But, when she does the TV star makes it a point to avoid sharing pictures of Katherine's face. Instead, the images of her little girl are taken from behind.
"I’m on social media and like sharing with people what my interests are and how my day’s going and all of that, but I do feel entitled to have privacy about my daughter and my relationships," she told Glamour. "It’s really essential to my life that there be something not everybody knows about. That’s a boundary, but it’s a very small boundary. Everything else I really don’t have any issue sharing."
Safe to assume Kaling will also guard her son's privacy!
Related: Kelly Kapoor Talks a Lot, but These Are Our 33 Favorite Mindy Kaling Quotes From The Office
How did Mindy Kaling keep her second pregnancy a secret?
Kaling admitted to The Late Show's Stephen Colbert that she was able to keep her pregnancy a secret because “no one saw” her during the COVID-19 pandemic, plus "there was so much going on, so much heartbreak in the world that it felt strange to go out of my way to shine a light on some giant health information."
A source told E! Newsthat the producer originally planned to reveal her pregnancy at the 2020 Met Gala, but that did not happen since the star-studded event was canceled due to the global health crisis. The source said, "Keeping it private was easier this time because of quarantine. All of her work was done through Zoom." Per the source, Kaling was in the early months of her pregnancy at the 92nd annual Academy Awards, which she attended with Novak.
How was Mindy Kaling's first pregnancy announced?
Kaling's A Wrinkle in Time costar Oprah Winfrey accidentally spilled the beans on her first pregnancy. The media mogul confirmed to PEOPLE that Kaling was expecting at Disney’s D23 expo. “That’s when she told me. My mouth dropped,” Winfrey recalled. "'What did you just say?’ she said, ‘Oh, Oprah, I don’t think you know. I’m 5 months pregnant.’ And I said, ‘WHAAAAT?!’”
Kaling later told Ellen DeGeneres, “If anyone is going to announce big news about your private life, Oprah Winfrey is the person. You can’t complain that much about it. And you also can’t be like, 'Hey, Oprah, zip it’ because she’s almost like a religious figure.”
Katherine Kaling takes after mom!
Katherine, a.k.a Kit is taking after her famous mom! “My daughter is naturally funny and headstrong, which I love,” Kaling shared with Parade.com in 2019. “I hope she stays that way when she starts school with other kids, especially boys."
Kit helped Kaling reconnect with her religion
Though the Inside Out star considers herself only "kind of Hindu," she never wanted her little girl to be anything but Hindu. "Even if I don’t exactly care if my daughter is Hindu, I definitely don’t want her to be some other religion. So, I looked down at my sleeping eight-month-old baby and I whispered, 'You will not be a member of the Hillsong Church!'" she wrote in Nothing Like I Imagined (Except for Sometimes).
Kaling was initially against giving her daughter a Mundan ceremony, which rids a child's negativity from their past life by shaving off their hair, but in the end decided to go through with it. After the ceremony, Kaling put the Ziploc bag of her daughter’s hair on the Hindu shrine in her bedroom, next to a photo of her late mother.
"Looking at this photo of my mother and the little bag of Kit’s hair, I realized the one thing that would bridge all three of our lives was our faith, this intangible thing that had been passed on to me and that I would now pass on to my daughter. Somehow, through this ritual, I had transcended the impossible distance between me and my mom. I guess we do these things we don’t completely understand because we know that without them, we are untethered from our ancestors," Kaling realized.
She continued, "In that moment, standing alone in my bedroom, I felt so connected to my mother. It was finally clear. The reason I’m Kind of Hindu and will raise my daughter to be Kind of Hindu is to have this connection deep inside my own heart to other people who look like us and have shared key experiences, thousands of miles away. I don’t have to be full-on religious, and I doubt I’ll ever be knowledgeable enough to satisfy her or my curiosity about our faith, but I’m really going to try. As long as Kit and I are Kind of Hindu, we will never be alone."
Kaling adores her baby nurse
Kaling, whose mother passed away in 2012, revealed in her Amazon collection of essays, that her baby nurse Rose stepped in as her mom when she “needed a mom" following the birth of her first child. “I didn’t have my mom. But I did have Rose. Rose loved giving advice, and I loved listening to it. I would talk to her about trying to lose my baby weight for a movie I had to shoot, and she told me that I should drink apple cider vinegar every morning with water,” Kaling penned. “The fear of not losing the baby weight. The fear of going back to work and my baby forgetting me. The fear of raising this baby myself, forever. All these fears were the worst I’ve ever had in my life, and Rose helped me keep them at bay. She was my mom when I needed a mom, and that wasn’t even her job,” Kaling wrote.
She has plenty to say about single parenting
As a single mom herself, Kaling told Parade.com, "I have so much respect for working moms, especially single working moms!" While being a single parent can be "complicated" to Kaling, there are times when she's happy she doesn't have a husband. In her collection of essays, she confessed, "I save a truly staggering amount of time not having to run my parenting decisions by another person. Good or bad, I can just, like, quickly make a decision and move on with my day. This is so gratifying."