Sarah McLachlan reveals how she mended her relationship with her oldest daughter: ‘A long process’

Sarah McLachlan recently got candid and revealed what she did to mend her relationship with her oldest daughter.

The 58-year-old Canadian singer-songwriter welcomed two daughters, India Ann Sushil (born in 2002) and Taja Summer (born in 2007), with her ex-husband Ashwin Sood, whom she was married to from 1997 to 2008.

On Tuesday, February 17 episode of the Good Hang 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 on her in a different way. I was a hard ass.”

The Sweet Surrender crooner explained, “It’s funny because I thought so clearly in my own mind that I was being the antithesis of my mother. And I looked at the way she parented, and I thought, ‘I’m going to do everything completely different.’”

“Then her words come spewing out of your mouth in a moment of anger and frustration, and you’re like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe I did that,’” she recalled.

Notably, McLachlan’s behaviour brought negative effects on Sushil, as she sometimes would lash out or shut down when things used to take a toll on her but she failed to find out the core reason behind it as a mother.

Reflecting on the difficult approach she took with her daughter, the Fallen songstress quipped, “I looked at that and went, ‘How do I help you with this? How do we move past this, because the world out there is scary and big, and you have to have some grit, and you have to do hard things so that you know you can.'”

They then went to family counselling, where she learnt that her daughter was dealing with extreme anxiety. “The way I was communicating to her was just making her feel shitty 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 and take stock and go, ‘OK, look, I want a relationship with my kid. So, I need to learn how to communicate differently with her.’”

“It was a long process, but it was beautiful and powerful. And we have such an open, loving relationship now because of that,” McLachlan confessed.