Maria Shriver is sharing a vulnerable look at a challenging period of her life. In her upcoming book I Am Maria, the 69-year-old details coming to terms with the end of her marriage to Arnold Schwarzenegger and how it sparked a journey of self-actualization. Maria—who shares kids Katherine Schwarzenegger Pratt, 35, Christina Schwarzenegger, 33, Patrick Schwarzenegger, 31, and Christopher Schwarzenegger, 27, with Arnold—wrote in an expert of her book, per People, that the end of their marriage came as a “devastating, life-altering blow” following the deaths of her parents, Eunice Kennedy Shriver and Sargent Shriver.
“My twenty-five-year-long marriage blew up,” she continued. “It broke my heart, it broke my spirit, it broke what was left of me. Without my marriage, my parents, a job—the dam of my lifelong capital-D Denial just blew apart.” And while she noted she wouldn’t further discuss the details surrounding the end of her marriage—which occurred shortly before Arnold admitted to fathering a child, Joseph Baena, with household staffer Mildred “Patty” Baena—Maria wrote candidly about the emotional fallout she experienced.
“I was consumed with grief and wracked with confusion, anger, fear, sadness, and anxiety,” she admitted. “I was unsure now of who I was, where I belonged. Honestly, it was brutal, and I was terrified.” It was a time during which she learned to navigate—and overcome—the lifelong messaging she’d felt that, as a small piece of a hugely prominent and beloved American family, the Kennedys, “Maria isn’t enough.”
But after what she described as a “litany” of “trips to various therapists, healers, shamans, and psychics”—as well as time in a convent—Maria found healing through writing poetry. “I started writing from a deep place within,” she detailed. “Through my poetry, I’ve found a woman who was terrified of not being able to live up to her family’s legacy—scared of not being big enough, a good-enough daughter, sister, wife, mother, journalist.”
She continued, “I found a woman who had insisted on measuring herself by some impossible standard that guaranteed she’d come up short and feel bad about herself no matter what. I found someone who had spent a lifetime avoiding grief. And I also learned that when that lifetime of dissociated grief and trauma is released, it rushes out like a tsunami.”
Thankfully, while her emotional wellbeing was in flux, Maria noted her children remained steadfast through it all. Despite how “everything about their world and the sanctity of their home got uprooted in an instant,” Maria wrote, “I do want to take a moment to acknowledge the grace, valor, and courage my children exhibited.”
