“I really never thought I would get divorced. Especially not just after giving birth to my first child and especially not in the shadow of my husband’s new relationship with a celebrity.”
Ethan Slater’s ex-wife, Dr. Lilly Jay, is speaking out about her divorce from the Wicked star. In a personal essay for The Cut, Lilly wrote, “No one gets married thinking they’ll get divorced, in the same way we don’t board a plane expecting to crash. But I really never thought I would get divorced. Especially not just after giving birth to my first child and especially not in the shadow of my husband’s new relationship with a celebrity.”
Lilly went on to write about her experience as a psychologist specializing in women’s mental health, and said, “Becoming a psychologist solidified my detachment from social media,” while “my partner was on a different path, in which social media and exposure were not impediments but rather necessities. We puzzled through this predicament on walks, over pizza, in our apartment and excitedly concocted rules of engagement of how and what he would share about our lives together.”
Lilly went on to speak about her and Ethan’s move to England while he filmed Wicked, saying, “I confidently moved to another country with my 2-month-old baby and my husband to support his career. Consumed by the magic and mundanity of new motherhood, I didn’t understand the growing distance between us.”
“I work diligently on my private project of accepting the sudden public downfall of my marriage,” she pens. “This, I tell myself, is nothing to be ashamed of and nothing to hide. Slowly but surely, I have come to believe that in the absence of the life I planned with my high school sweetheart, a lifetime of sweetness is waiting for me and my child. While our partnership has changed, our parenthood has not. Both of us fiercely love our son 100 percent of the time, regardless of how our parenting time is divided.”
She also opened up about her experience with postpartum depression, saying, “My entire adult life, I feared that loss of control and postpartum depression would destroy me. One day in London, I looked up and found that they had both arrived. And I am okay. If I can’t be invisible anymore, I may as well introduce myself. You know how a sponge is most effective at absorbing liquid when it’s already a bit wet? Maybe we can think about my messy not-so-personal life in that way: a dose of my own loss, rage, powerlessness, sadness that helps me hold yours.”