Fans of talk show host and singer Kelly Clarkson were shocked to learn that the vocal powerhouse was filing for divorce from her husband after nearly seven years of marriage. Kelly and Brandon Blackstock, who serves as her music manager and executive producer of The Kelly Clarkson Show, showed no signs of rockiness leading up to the split.
Sources close to the couple have said that their time socially distancing as a family revealed cracks in their relationship. An interview Kelly did before announcing her split supports the theory. In an interview with Glamour UK, Kelly sounds like many moms right now. Taking care of toddlers and teenagers at the same time is no easy feat. To top it off, she was still working on her various professional projects.
Kelly makes mention of Brandon only once in the interview, but maybe that's the point. His presence didn't seem to be a helpful one as Kelly tried to balance everything on her plate. The dissolution of this marriage could be, like many others, the product of an unequal division of responsibilities.
Glamour UK recently released an interview with Kelly Clarkson talking about her life in quarantine, her new single, and more. The interview was conducted prior to Kelly filing for divorce from husband Brandon Blackstock. While we haven't heard from Kelly on the subject directly yet, the interview provides some interesting insight into Kelly's life leading up to the split.
The interview begins with Josh Smith asking Kelly how she's hanging in there during social distancing. "Honestly, I have been on an emotional roller coaster. This has been really hard as a working parent, because I'm still doing all the same jobs," she said.
"It's been exhausting honestly, cooking every meal and cleaning nonstop after toddlers and teenagers! Everybody's learning from home now and the teaching! So, everything has been crazy," Kelly continued.
Kelly was then asked about what it's like to have so much going on with the kids while also tending to her professional responsibilities.
"Well, especially in this time, I've definitely reminded people that I work with I'm doing the best I can. I'm literally holding down so many things right now," she acknowledged.
"Not only jobs, but even things where we usually had a lot more help. We are fortunate, so I'm not complaining in that sense, but I've definitely had to [tell] people that I work with, 'you hired a mom and I'm not an absentee mom. I'm a full-on mom,'" Kelly explained.
"I already have abandonment issues, so I don't want to pass those down."
Kelly has been open about those issues throughout her career. She worked through a lot of those feelings in her music, particularly her first few albums.
"I don't think you get rid of that," Kelly noted.
"I have people in my life that suffer from addiction to certain things and that doesn't go away. It's always there. It's just navigating your life around that existence in your life. You don't ever one day wake up and are like, 'Okay, I'm totally cool with the fact that I have major abandonment issues because horrible things happened.'"
"That's why I write songs about it and you connect with all these people that you don't know. Or even an artist, as on my team right now on The Voice, we have a very similar background and it's nice to be able to look at her and go, 'Look, you don't ever get over that,'" she said.
"It's always going to present itself. You get married and you're like, 'Oh, I have no one for the dance or to walk me down the aisle. You know what? I'm not going to get married, just going to elope.'"
"There are always things that happen that come up that bum you out, but at the same time you've got to recognise at some point though, that it's made you who you are," she said of her experiences.
"You are thankful and I'm a very strong individual. I'm very confident and I've been forced to find that in myself. I've been forced to at a very early age. At some point, I say thank you to my father, who passed away last year. But I thank him as I wouldn't have been able to be all that I am right now without all of that. So, you just take your cards you're dealt, and you do the best you can with them."
Kelly has turned her pain into empowerment, but she recognizes that isn't how it happens for everyone. "If you want it to, because I also have friends that have had similar backgrounds and they go the other way, and they're always in a self-pity victim mode. You can sit here and cry about it all day long, but it's not going to help you and you're not hurting anyone but yourself," she noted.
"I think it's a choice. It's a choice, whatever cards you're dealt, what you do with them. And we all don't make those right choices all the time. "
It's interesting to find Kelly in such a mindset. For an interview this big during a promotional cycle for a new single, her thoughts had to be calculated to a certain degree. She seems very sure of what she's saying, but fans can't help but notice that the situations she unpacks could also relate to her marriage as much as they did to her past trauma.
Kelly sounded equally introspective and exhausted when she spoke to People magazine about her family's quarantine in Montana in May.
"It's so hard to keep your mind and emotional state together," she said.
"We're used to going to a place of business and working and then coming home and that's your relaxed place, and that's where you have fun. The same thing for kids [with school]."
"On top of that, we thought we were going to be here for a minute, but we didn't know we were going to be here this long and we don't have a home here," she continued.
"So we've been staying in a cabin. We've been in really close quarters and it's been kind of nuts, I'm not going to lie."
"At the end of the day, I know people who have had coronavirus and I'm just very lucky and we're very blessed to not have been sick. We keep reminding our kids of that and we keep reminding each other of that. But we definitely have some cabin fever going on."
During the same interview, Kelly opened up about working with 4-year-old son Remington, who has had struggles with speech and hearing.
"He had a speech problem because he had this ear problem when he was a baby," she explained.
"We didn't know. But way deep down in his ears, he got clogged up with a ton of wax where we thought, almost, he was deaf because he spoke as if he was underwater."
"We found [out] it was something simple, but it pushed him back almost nine months. So we've been working really hard with his speech and he's still doing his speech therapist via Zoom," she continued.
"The big milestone for us is Remy getting to really find out his own personality and his identity, because it's been frustrating for him to not be able to really vocalize his emotion. It's a really important thing and it's very frustrating for them and us because we can't communicate all the time. The fact that he's making full sentences now and full-on engaging with us is really a blessing."
Kelly seemed to have a lot on her plate. It's so much that it begs the question, what was Brandon doing amid all of this? Aside from Kelly, he manages Cale Dodds, Emily Ann Roberts, John King, and Kelly's The Voice costar Blake Shelton. Of course, everything in the industry has slowed significantly due to COVID-19.
It seems very possible that Kelly's decision to divorce came from her exhaustion at carrying more than her weight in family responsibilities in the relationship. Her professional roster is nothing to ignore, either. Just because she's capable of being a superwoman doesn't mean she should always have to be. It's a situation and a feeling that so many can relate with.
