I Wanna Drink Wine with Kelly Clarkson

Why I bond with Kelly pre and post-divorce.

I’m watching The Kelly Clarkson Show when she confesses she can’t imagine getting married again.

I’m like, “Girl, I get you! I got you!”

I tell my boys if they get married I’ll throw my body across the altar.

Kinda dramatic? My boys think so. They usually yell, “MOM!”

“Okay, okay,” I say. “But I’m only half kidding.”

Can you blame me? It took me five years to divorce my husband. Why would I ever consider attaching myself to someone like that again?

I was like divorce me. Please divorce me. For God’s sake divorce me. Just flipping divorce me. When my husband still wouldn’t listen, I called a few of his friends and said, “Please tell him to divorce me.”

But I bonded with Kelly long before that.

The day I watched her sing Piece By Piece on American Idol.

I cried with her.

My dad left when I was five years old. I still feel every word of that song. And from every side. The little girl who watched a man she thought hung the moon disappear. The one who cried herself to sleep wondering where he had gone.

How does a man who made you believe you were his world walk out of yours?

And I felt it as a mom who swore it would never happen to her children.

Until it did.

There’s an agony in knowing the precise heartache your babies will feel. Because you cried those tears. The ones you promised yourself would never escape anywhere near you again.

It made me feel like I had to forgive myself twice.

Once for shattering an ideal.

Another time for repeating history.

But just as the little girl in me knew there was peace when my dad was gone. The adult in me understood a broken relationship hurts together or apart. And there’s as much strength in leaving as weakness in staying.

Only I had no idea how brutal it was.

My mom had picked up our own pieces.

But I really didn’t understand her grief or appreciate her courage.

Now the five-year-old me met the grown woman and we cried together. We let go of fairy tales, one true love, and perfection. We let go of judgments and mistakes and of well-intentioned do-overs gone wrong.

Together we embraced what my mom taught me.

That one parent has the ability to love enough where two should typically stand.

And childhood wounds don’t destroy us, they define us.

They make us better people, deepen empathy, and reinforce resilience.

It’s one of the reasons I bond with Kelly Clarkson. The light within her can’t be extinguished despite one of her worst fears coming true. I’m making a supposition here but as the child of divorce, it’s also not uncommonly mine.

It’s what we seek to avoid.

The second separation in our lives.

It’s why re-visiting the altar is frightening.

One day I wanna have wine with Kelly Clarkson.

Though I’m not sure which of us will have time to come up for air. You see, I’m a bit of a talker, just ask the nuns from my elementary school. I say it’s one of my God-given gifts. Somehow Sister Agnese never bought that.

I’m a natural communicator.

And wine, let’s just say it turns me into a professional one.