1 Tata Institute of Social Sciences, INDIA 2 Tezpur University, INDIA *Corresponding Author: smitha.s83@gmail.com INTRODUCTION Smitha: Rajesh and I were doing our PhD together and were of the same age when we got married – that means, as per conventions, I was old, and he was the ‘right age’ to get married. My being old was directly co-related, with few years left for my capacity to reproduce ‘without complications.’ This ‘without complications’ is something that I constantly heard – this would be in the form of casual conversations, friendly advice, and inquiries by neighbours and ‘community members.’ I was also asked to visit a doctor to help me conceive. My partner was never privy to, or the recipient of, any advice to ‘see a doctor’. It seemed like a big responsibility, especially when we were completing our PhD and looking for a job. Rajesh was the first to get a job, and it came with exciting changes; one thing that increased was the push to have a baby because at least he has a faculty appointment now. In all of this, we were always unsure about having a child – will we be able to take care of a child? Are we in a financial position to take care of another human being? Is parenting something we want to do? These are constant discussions that we had as a couple. As an individual, I was unsure of my ability to be a ‘good mother’. I reached an age where I was considered a high-risk category to have a child. After a long wait, I got a teaching job at a university and came to know that I was pregnant. I had been waiting for a teaching job for a long time and was utterly perplexed about my situation. My workplace took me away from Rajesh, making it even more difficult. A new job, a new city, and the pregnancy created a turmoil of emotions. New support systems emerged – my mom came to stay with me and help with the pregnancy and in the form of a few new colleagues. I worked throughout my pregnancy and was able to handle all my Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics, 7(1), 12 ISSN: 2468-4414 Mothering and Radical Selfcare: An Autoethnography of Participating in a Facebook Parenting Group Smitha Sasidharan Nair 1 *, Rajesh Kalarivayil 2 Published: March 1, 2023 Caring for myself is not self-indulgence; it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare. (Audre Lorde ([1988] 2017: 130) ABSTRACT The article documents the experiences of parenting of an urban Indian Hindu middle-class couple at the intersection of virtual and physical spaces and ideas. The experiences and ideas documented in this paper have co-evolved as the authors are parenting their four-year-old daughter and realised how their participation in a Facebook parenting group is influencing them as parents. The relational perspective in autoethnography is used to examine the mutual influences between the authors as partners, parents, and participants in the Facebook parenting group. This is done to understand how our participation in the Facebook parenting group mutually influenced our understanding of ideas of empowered mothering and self-care. The paper draws from Audre Lorde’s idea of radical self-care to analyse the interactions on the online group on empowered mothering and self-care. Keywords: mothering, motherhood, parenting, self-care, self-love, empowered mothering, online, Facebook, autoethnography, Indian, middle-class parents