It Happened To Me: In The Time It Took To Watch The 'Barbie' Movie With My Daughter, I Decided To End My 20-year Marriage To Her Dad. So I did.
None of us ever expected me to do that, especially so suddenly. And I didn’t expect it to affect my relationship with Skylar the way it did — and still does years later.
Hello, Fellow Kooks,
Before we get into the highlighted post for today, I want to say WELCOME to all the gorgeous, fresh new readers and WELCOME BACK to you old-timers, the backbone of this whole thing (don't you ever leave me).
If you’re new, I highly encourage you to check out the site as a whole beyond this fairly perfunctory email, because there is new and archived stuff there every day that will blow you away. In a good way or a bad way. If it's bad, tell me, too. Talking to you about what's here and about any random thing you’re doing or thinking about is my favorite part of this whole endeavor.
Also, here's a fairly innocuous, easy-to-answer question to get us started, if you don't mind answering in the comments below: Did you ever read:
A) Sassy magazine
B) Jane magazine
C) xoJane.com
D) None of the what-in-the-hell-are-you-talking-about above?
Thanks for being here and being yourself, however you are right now. I love all of all of you.*
Love, Jane
*With that line, I may have just morphed into the guy who invites you back to his apartment, picks up his acoustic guitar and starts singing “Wonderwall,” before launching into an original song with lyrics as good as mine there. Forgive me!
PS Corynne and I had some fun battles while line-editing this piece. (The writer, Amanda, who sent me this idea at jane@anotherjaneprattthing.com - and you're highly encouraged to do the same thing, was amenable and collaborative and wonderfully creative throughout.) Basically, I fought against re-hyping the Barbie movie (which I never saw - intentionally, and which she loved). So I have a feeling our disagreement may arise again in the comments, also, because even though that thing came out 10 trillion years ago, apparently it still incites some strong opinions. And you're the only people who could potentially sway me from mine. (Sorry, Corynne! Sorry, Mom!)
By Amanda Jane
While our 16-year-old daughter, an only child, was back home in Florida from boarding school for the summer of 2023, she asked if I would see the Barbie movie with her. Sure.
Sitting in the theater together (she had already seen it, but wanted to take me) I watched the characters visit the patriarchal “real world” and the Barbies become hypnotized into thinking they must serve the Kens, you know the plot. And then, I think it was right during the scene when the Kens are singing “Push” around the campfire, Holy shit, a voice inside said. I cannot do my life anymore, not for one more second.
Like the hypnotized Barbies, I had always put my husband’s needs before my own. And just like they had, I finally snapped out of it.
The unspoken agreement between us was that Skylar had been my idea, so she was my responsibility.
I met my husband, Jon, in college. I was so young that I still didn’t know what kind of life I wanted. Instead of waiting to find myself, I let his desires become mine.
Though we were both New Yorkers, we settled in Florida, where he’d always wanted to live. He designed and built our home himself, which, over the years, he filled with things that made him happiest: His African art collection, the teak furniture he loved, the Andy Warhol Brillo Box reproductions, which he had constructed by hand and stacked in every corner of the living room.
Our physical environment was not the only thing that Jon chose for us. Although I had many friends, they rarely came over. Jon was a very private person who didn’t enjoy guests in our home. Even when my parents visited, I made sure they only stayed for two nights so as not to make him uncomfortable.
I did insist on one thing: Having a child, which was something he had been ambivalent about. When I became pregnant, he accepted the idea — but after our daughter was born, he was unwilling to assume any childcare responsibilities. He opted out of feeding Skylar or changing her diaper, or even staying with her without me present. The unspoken agreement between us was that Skylar had been my idea, so she was my responsibility.
Consequently, he discouraged me from taking an out-of-the-home job that would pull me from my maternal role and necessitate him taking on more parenting or household tasks. (I did work outside the home, eventually, but I couldn’t devote as much time to my career as others did, meaning I never got promotions or raises.) So that day in the theater with my daughter, as I watched the patriarchal Ken-dom take over Barbie World on screen, I felt sick. I have never made a major life decision so quickly.
I have never gone from complete lack of awareness to crystal clear certainty — and then determination — in less time than it takes to prepare Taco Tuesday.
I am just like one of those dolls I thought. In trying to please my life partner, I had completely lost myself.
It makes sense in a way that The Barbie Movie was the catalyst for my divorce. I had forever been a Barbie girl. I had a massive collection that I kept in a bin in my childhood bedroom. Our Barbies even wore real mink furs, thanks to our housekeeper at the time who would bring my sister and me real pieces of animal fur for our dolls. (On an unrelated note, she was a Holocaust survivor. On a related note, she was married to a furrier.)
I remember being in the bath with a friend at age eight, our knees sticking up and above the waterline — four mountains, one for each of the dolls we held in our fists, two Barbies and two Kens, on a double-date camping trip. My Barbie kept trying to steal the other Ken from my friend’s Barbie. It was fun playing the villain. In real life, I was so unassertive. In real life, I fed my husband before he became hungry. I took care of his sexual needs before he had to ask.
As a child, Barbie opened my world to so many choices and options. But, somehow, almost as soon as I became an adult, I opted out of a real life that gave me choices.
The very next day after seeing Barbie in theaters, Skylar sat with me in an inflatable pool in our backyard, drinking lemonade. “You’ll never leave,” she said. At first, I thought she meant the little pool… but then I understood.
“Don’t worry about me, Skylar. I can take care of myself.”
She persisted. “Name one thing you and Daddy have in common.”
Had she had the same movie-induced epiphany I had? I asked myself. No, I reasoned. Teenagers get off on challenging their parents.
“Sweetie, there are many things,” I replied — even though I couldn’t think of one. One day before, I had already made up my mind to end it. Still, my knee-jerk reaction was to defend my marriage.
“Name one,” she repeated.
“We’ve been together a long time.”
Skylar sighed. Of course. She had not needed an epiphany. She’d had a front row seat for 16 years. She had seen what neither Jon nor I could admit, but we both knew: We were not compatible.
The next day, I confronted Jon. “I am not happy in this marriage. I’m ready to be happy,” I heard myself say to my husband. “I deserve to be happy.”
I knew what was holding him together — and I knew what could break him apart
“Are you saying you want a divorce?”
“I am.”
It was both difficult and liberating to admit how unhappy I was. As I told Jon that I wanted the divorce, I cried harder than I ever remember having done, at least as an adult. But when my tears dried up, I wouldn’t cry again for months; that is how resolute I was in my decision.
Jon was as blindsided and devastated as I was certain and determined. I was a necessary part of the world he had constructed for himself, and my decision to leave was a massive blow to a man whose desires I knew more intimately than I know my own.
After he built our home, Jon liked to tell me, “I know where every screw is in this house.” In some ways, that’s how I felt about him. I knew what was holding him together — and I knew what could break him apart. Not having me in his life topped that list. This is also why, though deep down I had always wanted to leave, I couldn’t bring myself to seriously consider it …until that moment in the theater, after which I couldn’t seriously consider staying.
“I know I won’t be able to change your mind,” he’d said, right after I said I wanted to end the marriage. This was a first. Up until that moment, he’d known that he could get me to give in about almost anything. I’d always told myself that my adaptability was my superpower when, in actuality, it had been his.
When we sat Skylar down to tell her the official news of our split, she had only one question — and it was for her dad.