Sarah McLachlan recently opened up and revealed what she did to repair her relationship with her eldest daughter.
The 58-year-old Canadian singer-songwriter welcomed two daughters, India Ann Sushil (born 2002) and Taja Summer (born 2007), with her ex-husband Ashwin Sood, to whom she was married from 1997 to 2008.
On Tuesday February 17 episode of the Good contact with Amy Poehler podcast, McLachlan opened up about her broken relationship with Sushil and how she fixed it.
She admitted to Poehler, “I would have been softer with her in a different way. I was a hard ass.”
The Sweet surrender crooner explained, “It’s funny because I so clearly thought I was the antithesis of my mother. And I looked at the way she parented, and I thought, ‘I’m going to do everything completely differently.'”
“Then her words come out of your mouth, in a moment of anger and frustration, and you say, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe I did that,'” she recalled.
McLachlan’s behavior in particular had a negative impact on Sushil as she would sometimes lash out or shut down when things used to take their toll, but as a mother she failed to get to the root of the reason behind it.
Reflecting on the difficult approach she took with her daughter, the Fallen singer joked, “I looked at it and said, ‘How can I help you with this? How can we get past this, because the world out there is scary and big, and you gotta have some guts, and you gotta do some hard things, so you know you can do it.'”
They then went to family therapy, where she learned that her daughter was struggling with extreme anxiety. “The way I communicated with her made her feel bad about herself, instead of building her up, which was completely the opposite of what I thought I was doing.”
“I had to eat a lot of humble pie, take stock and say, ‘Okay, look, I want a relationship with my child. So I have to learn how to communicate with her differently.'”
“It was a long process, but it was beautiful and powerful. And because of that we now have such an open, loving relationship,” McLachlan admitted.
