Deciding to end a marriage is never easy, especially when kids are involved and you are a product of divorced parents yourself. Kelly Clarkson found herself in this position. She had to do the inner work to come to peace with the difficult choice.
Kelly recently appeared on the podcast We Can Do Hard Things With Glennon Doyle and opened up about why her eight-year marriage to Brandon Blackstock ended. Kelly said she "felt limited" in her relationship but stayed longer than she should have because of her "ego." She explained she diminished herself in her marriage and "that's not a healthy way to live."
Kelly and Brandon first met at a rehearsal for the Country Music Awards in 2006. Brandon is a manager representing musicians such as Blake Shelton. The former couple did not start dating until 2012, when they reconnected at the Super Bowl.
Kelly and Brandon were married on October 20, 2013, at Blackberry Farms in Tennessee. Their daughter, River Rose, was born on June 12, 2014. Remington Alexander was born on April 12, 2016.
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River and Remington are part of the reason Kelly stayed in the marriage for so long. "If I'm being completely honest, we don't want to do what we saw done," Kelly explained. "I don't want my kids to be those kids at school." Kelly’s parents divorced when she was 6 years old, which made her feel different from all the other kids her age.
Thankfully, times have changed. "It's a little different — they grew up here and it's a very progressive city. But in the South, there was like two of us with divorced parents in our class. So it was very different," she said. "Even when you come down to like, daddy-daughter dances and you don't have anyone show up. You have to think about all of those things and you play it out differently in your head too."
Kelly wants to be the best mom possible but also has to take care of herself. “You never start thinking about yourself. That's why sometimes to be selfish was important to me,” she added.
Another reason Kelly stayed for so long was simply pride. "My ego… [I thought,] 'I can do this. I can handle so much.' My ego is, 'I can control my actions, I can control my reactions, I can do this and I can reach this person and I can get through.' It becomes a little bit of your ego that gets in the way," Kelly confessed.
After wrestling with it for some time, Kelly made the difficult decision to leave because she did not feel like she could fully be herself in the marriage. "I felt limited. And I don't feel like that's the truth for all marriages, I just think that was my case," she explained. "To say that's just his fault, that's my fault for allowing that to happen. That's my work as well. It could also be limiting because as in love as I was, I just wasn't ready. Maybe the other person wasn't either and you try to make it work but it doesn't."
All of the tracks on her upcoming album, Chemistry, were inspired by her divorce. Her song "Lighthouse" explores how she diminished her own light within herself. "You choose to dim it. If I'm not around people like friends, families and lovers that are OK with the amount of light that I have then we're just not meant to be together and that's OK," she said. "But to dull yourself so you feel like somebody else can shine or so you feel like you're not in the way or whatever the situation is … that's not a healthy way to live."
