MonikaVerma

There is a specific silence in a house after a loss. It isn't the absence of noise — my daughter was small and loud and gloriously indifferent to grief. It was the absence of the second voice. The one that says "I'll take her, you sleep." The one that agrees with you at 2am that yes, this fever is probably nothing.

For a long time I thought the hardest part of becoming a single parent would be the practical things. Money, paperwork, the way every form assumes there are two of you. Those were hard. But the harder thing was smaller: I had lost my witness. Nobody else in the world was going to remember the exact face she made the first time she ate a mango.

So I started recording it. Not for anyone. Just so that some version of that second voice existed. A video here, a note there, a photo of a very ordinary Tuesday. That is genuinely how this account began — not as a business plan, but as a witness I built for myself.

Then other women started writing to me. Widows. Divorced mothers. Women whose partners were alive and present and who still felt like they were doing all of it alone. And I realised the thing I had assumed was my most private failure — the crying in the bathroom, the guilt of being short-tempered, the terror of being the only adult — was the most common experience in the world. It was just never posted.

Here is what I would tell you if you are at the beginning of this:

You do not have to be strong today. You have to be present today. Those are different jobs and only one of them is required. Your child does not need a mother who has processed everything. They need a mother who comes back into the room.

Ask for help in specific sentences. "I'm struggling" gets you sympathy. "Can you take her Saturday morning from ten to one" gets you three hours. People want to help and most of them are just waiting to be told how.

And let yourself be happy without checking whether you're allowed to be. That took me the longest. The first time I laughed properly — really laughed, at something stupid — I felt like I had done something wrong. I hadn't. Grief is not a debt you pay in permanent misery.

People call widows unlucky. Broken. They say it kindly, which somehow makes it worse. I want to be very clear about this: I am not what happened to me. I am what I did afterwards. And what I did was get up, every single day, and raise a very happy child.

— Monika

I was invited to a conversation on youth safety and AI. Everyone else in that room could talk about models and policy and safeguards. I could talk about one specific child who will grow up in a world where a machine can answer her before I can.

That turns out to be a useful thing to bring to a room like that.

Here is what I said, more or less. My generation of parents learned the internet as adults. We got to be suspicious of it. Our children will not have that luxury — for them, asking an AI something will feel as ordinary as asking a teacher, and they will not naturally sort one from the other. The question is not whether to keep children away from it. That ship has sailed and taken the harbour with it. The question is what habits we build before they need them.

Three things I have started doing at home, and I am not claiming they're enough:

We say out loud when something is a machine. When we use a voice assistant or an AI tool together, I name it. "That's a computer answering, not a person." She is small. But children are excellent at absorbing categories early, and I would rather she learn the boundary now than unlearn a blur later.

We practise doubting things. Not cynicism — curiosity. "How would we find out if that's true?" is a game we play with everything, including things I've said. A child who is comfortable checking her mother is a child who will be comfortable checking a chatbot.

The rule is: tell me, don't hide it. If anything on a screen makes her feel strange, scared or excited in a way she can't explain, nothing bad happens when she tells me. Nothing. No device gets taken away as punishment for honesty. The day a child decides that telling you costs them something is the day you stop finding out.

What I asked for, from the people building these things: assume a parent in the room is not technical, is tired, and has ninety seconds. Safety that requires a settings menu and a good mood is not safety for most Indian families. Make the safe path the default path.

I left that room genuinely more hopeful than I went in, which surprised me. Not because anybody has solved this. Because they were asking parents at all.

— Monika

Every Indian mother has had the two-second version of this nightmare. A crowded market, a wedding, a mall on a Sunday. You look down and the small hand is not there. Mine lasted maybe forty seconds. It rearranged something in me permanently.

After that I stopped relying on "stay close to Mumma" as a safety plan, because it isn't one. It's a hope. So we built an actual script, and we rehearse it the way schools rehearse fire drills — calmly, repeatedly, when nothing is wrong.

Rule one: stop walking. A lost child who keeps moving becomes a much harder child to find. We practise freezing on the spot. I tell her: I am already looking for you, and I am very good at it, so make my job easy by staying still.

Rule two: pick a safe grown-up, don't wait to be picked. This is the one most of us get backwards. We teach "don't talk to strangers", and then a lost child stands silent while strangers walk past. Instead we practise choosing: a woman with a child of her own, or someone behind a counter with a uniform and a till. Someone who is working there and cannot easily walk away.

Rule three: know your grown-ups' names. Not "Mumma". My full name. Then my phone number, learned as a song, which is the only way a four-year-old learns ten digits. We sing it in the car.

Rule four: agree on a meeting point before you go in. The moment we enter anywhere big, we pick one visible thing. The escalator. The gate we came through. If we get separated, that's where we both go.

The Noise Junior event was about the technology side of this — the watches that let a child call you and let you see where they are, without handing a small person an open internet. I like that category of product a lot, and I said so honestly: not because a gadget replaces the script, but because it buys a frightened parent the one thing they cannot get anywhere else, which is information in the first minute.

Teach the script anyway. Batteries die. Children don't stop being small.

— Monika

Solo-parent travel is a different sport. There is no tag team. Nobody watches the bags while you take her to the toilet. You are the planner, the porter, the entertainment and the person who has to stay calm.

I still do it, several times a year, between Delhi NCR, Bengaluru and back home to Bihar. Here is the unglamorous version of how.

Book around her sleep, not around the fare. The two thousand rupees you save on a 5am flight will be spent, with interest, on a meltdown in a security queue. I now treat her nap window as a fixed cost of the trip.

One bag you can run with. Everything essential — documents, medicines, water, one change of clothes for each of us, snacks — lives in a single bag that stays on my body. Checked luggage can be lost. That bag cannot.

Snacks are infrastructure, not treats. Small, frequent, boring. Hunger is behind about seventy per cent of what looks like a tantrum.

Give her a job. She holds the boarding pass. She counts our bags. A toddler with a role is dramatically easier than a toddler being managed, and it's also how they learn to travel rather than be transported.

Plan one thing a day. One. Anything more and you are running a schedule, not having a holiday. The gap in the middle of the day is where the actual memories happen — the hotel pool, the auto ride she found hilarious, the dog outside the restaurant.

Ask for the help that exists. Indian airports and railway stations are full of staff who will help a woman travelling alone with a child, and most of them will do it warmly if you ask. Pride is heavy. Leave it at home.

And take the photo where you look tired. In ten years the one where the hair is wrong and she's mid-shriek will be the one you can't look at without your chest hurting, in the good way.

— Monika

People assume the mother-daughter photos take five minutes because we look like we're having fun in them. We are having fun in them. That is the last twenty seconds of a much longer story.

A shoot with a toddler runs on her clock. If she is fed, rested and unbothered, you have perhaps ninety good minutes. Not consecutive. Scattered across three hours, in bursts of about four minutes, arriving without warning.

So the whole job becomes readiness. Lights set before she arrives. Outfit already on her, because a two-year-old will not be changed twice. Somebody standing just off-camera whose only task is making her laugh. And a photographer willing to shoot continuously and find the frame afterwards, rather than asking a small child to hold a pose — which has never once worked, for anyone, in history.

What I've learned to tell brands, before we sign anything:

Give me a mood, not a shot list of the child. I can guarantee you a feeling. I cannot guarantee you her specific facial expression on a Tuesday afternoon.

Build in a buffer day. Children get fevers the night before shoots. It's not unprofessional to say so, it's just true, and the brands I most enjoy working with plan for it.

Let her stop. This is the non-negotiable one. The moment she's done, we're done, and I will make the rest of the deliverable work some other way. Every parent watching can tell the difference between a child who is enjoying herself and a child who is being worked. So can their followers. It is the fastest way to lose the trust I spent five years building.

The matching outfits, though? Entirely for me. No brand asked. I just think we look excellent.

— Monika