Sarah Sharp’s “Kidding” Discusses The Reality Of Divorce
The following is a guest post from Austin’s own jazz institution Sarah Sharp, in which she shares a story about the connection between a hard situation in her personal life and a song she sculpted from that experience. You can listen to the song here.
Well… This post is certainly not about being a perfect mom. I’m going to share the last song on my most recent EP, which is about the end of my marriage. I wrote “Kidding” with my Ex. I asked him to sit down and help me put chords to it when the melody, lyrics, and bass line were pretty much written. In the process of finishing the song together, I changed it to be written from his perspective. We spent almost 20 years together and we share 3 elementary school-aged children. For the last two years of our relationship, we went through a very thorough, conscientious process of trying to decide whether to stay together, trying to decide what was the ACTUAL right thing to do. And we both wanted to do that… whatever was actually right. Toward the very end, we were certain of our inevitable separation, but still not certain of the timing. The timing was about the kids and our hearts hung on the fact that we had done so much work, we had finally figured so much out about ourselves, and we had truly become witnesses to each other’s growth. Almost everything was fixed and now coming from these new, more fully-adult versions of ourselves.
We were still thinking that perhaps we could hold it all together for a few more years for their sakes. Then one of my children asked a question on the drive home from school that made me certain that the kids know everything. All kids are so very intuitive, and I think mine particularly have one foot still directly planted in the source from which they came.
We started thinking about the undercurrent of our household. Not just the day to day dialing in of routine, pleasantries, not-so-pleasantries, and checking off boxes, but what we were truly modeling for our children and how that might affect their future relationships. We were no longer romantically bonded. My grandparents’ generation would have held it together and done their best to manage the resentment, frustration and soul death (what it felt like to us) of seeing the commitment through to “death do us part”.
We both read something that really resonated… the general concept was that your kids can end up in counseling saying, “My parents separated when I was X years old and that was very difficult and here’s is how that has affected me.” Or they could end up in therapy internalizing the disconnect that was modeled in our unspoken inauthenticity as their own issues, “My family was pretty perfect or at least normal, my parents definitely loved me and yet I have all these problems truly connecting, bonding, committing, etc. in romantic love.” We didn’t want that. We are two souls needing to spread out, in order to continue to grow and holding it together “for the kids” became simply false.
I live in daily gratitude that we’ve been able to make this transition with grace and remain bonded as a family. All five of us. I think you will hear that in the song. My Ex spent over an hour on my front porch swing with me yesterday with his new puppy while the kids played. I pray that the kids will see in the long-run that we did the best we could and that in being true to ourselves and each other they will inherently do the same for themselves.
You can listen to Sarah Sharp’s full Dream EP here.