Kate’s Story
The holy grail. A story of amicable, loving and family focused separation
When my first husband told me he was leaving me, I thought he was kidding. We’d woken in our pool villa in Thailand, on the 2013 edition of the annual two week trip we always jokingly called our ‘Stay Married Holiday’. Because of course we were always staying married. We didn’t need time away from the kids and daily life to make that happen.
‘I want a divorce’, he said. It was about 7.30am. He’d found texts from a male friend on my phone. Platonic, I assure you. The most inflammatory comment was in regard to my turn as one of Kochie’s Angels on Sunrise: ‘You’re always an angel to me’. It seemed stupid. I put on my gym gear, told him I’d meet him in 45 minutes at the hotel breakfast buffet.
But it wasn’t stupid to him, and he wasn’t kidding, and we ended up separating and eventually divorcing after 23 years of marriage and 29 years after meeting at age 17 on the Surfers Paradise beach.
My brother, who was at the same school as my husband, introduced us. We went out that night with fake IDs to see Dragon at Bombay Rock and he bought me a lemon, lime and bitters. We were friends for a couple of years and had great fun living in a share house together in 1985, the year after HSC. In 1988, when I came back to Melbourne from a year in Europe, we had dinner and bang, were in love.
During our fantastic decades together we had three children, bought two houses, did two renovations, travelled, fought, laughed, had terrific parties, always had each other’s backs. Until we didn’t. A terrible upheaval in our family which I can’t talk about because it’s not my story to tell saw us fracture. We had vastly different approaches to how we should proceed. We started seeing things that weren’t there, looking for things that were missing. Two years of counselling seemed to work, until the Thailand holiday that was our last hurrah together.
I’m telling you this so you know how much we loved each other—and how much I still do love him. The promise I made in a little country church at age 24, to love him always, remains intact. And somehow we managed to navigate our divorce with the same love and care that brought us together in the first place.
A decade on, we still have a joint bank account. He takes my parents out to roller derby games. We’ve plated up sausage rolls at our son’s 30th, just like in the olden days, held onto each other watching our daughter walk across a stage as a university graduate. When our middle son bought his first place in 2023, we were on the phone fast to congratulate ourselves on our parenting milestone.
And no, creating this divorce wasn’t easy. Separation brings with it anger, frustration, confusion, grief, panic, everything. The realisation that you’ll no longer be together is agonising. Divorce nearly destroyed me.
The worst part was packing up our linen and toy cupboards. The kids’ novelty single doona covers, the Lego, the well-read copy of Avocado Baby we were keeping for when our future grandchildren stayed over. The loss of that felt like a rat eating my heart.
My (outgoing) husband was incredible. He boxed up everything with a ‘Grandchildren-to-be’ label, promising we would still be in it together somehow when the time came.
I was bereft. What did my life look like now? Who would I go on holiday with? I felt I was losing not just my present but the future I’d thought I’d have.
This is the short version, but the key to our amicable divorce—and I speak only for myself here—was putting myself in Jay’s shoes. Separating myself from how much I hated the decision to acknowledge it was what he wanted and needed. To be as gracious and generous as possible.
But I had no clue what that looked like. Wished for a book on divorce that would talk me through the steps—financial, emotional, mental. Didn’t know which friends I could trust as counsellors because everyone seemed invested in the ‘Kate and Jay’ brand. Longed for practical, compassionate advice about the way forward.
In the early days, I panicked and went to a lawyer. She was adversarial, wanted to hang my husband out to dry, wanted a big retainer. I left that meeting knowing she was the wrong person to handle the terrible schism in my life. I knew Jay and I had decades and decades ahead of us, side by side at weddings, births, probably funerals. Smashing each other over material goods was wrong. We needed to handle this ourselves.
After that, he and I simply sat down and asked each other what we wanted when it came to splitting up our life. We got half each of everything and when I asked for a lump sum in cash, he gave me that too, as well as all the furniture, the Le Creuset cookware, the photo albums. The dog. We didn’t check super balances or discuss projected earnings. The money of course was important but the priority for both of us was showing our children—and us—that ending the marriage didn’t mean ending the relationship.
We valued the idea of always being a family, even if it looked different.
I wish for anyone what I have had. Being divorced is awful enough without rancour and chaos. I think it was Drew Barrymore who said it feels like being dragged naked down a giant cheese grater. But there is a right way to do it: with calm love.
Telling someone you don’t want to be married anymore takes huge courage, and is hopefully rewarded with an enriching second act.