Maria Shriver has opened up about her “brutal” divorce from Arnold Schwarzenegger – and the way the stunning cut up left her “terrified.”
In her upcoming new e book, “I Am Maria: My Reflections and Poems on Heartbreak, Healing and Finding Your Home,” the 69-year-old creator particulars the top of her marriage to Schwarzenegger in 2011 after 25 years.
She additionally touches on how the “devastating, life-altering blow” began her on a journey of self-discovery.
“It broke my heart, it broke my spirit, it broke what was left of me,” Shriver writes, per an excerpt of the e book obtained by Folks on Monday.
“Without my marriage, my parents, a job — the dam of my lifelong capital-D Denial just blew apart,” she provides. Shriver’s mother and father, Eunice and Sargent Shriver, handed away in 2009 and 2011, respectively.
“Now, much has been written about the end of my marriage,” she continues, “and frankly I don’t feel like I need or want to discuss it here, or anywhere.”
The journalist and former first girl of California provides that she was “consumed with grief and wracked with confusion, anger, fear, sadness and anxiety.” She was additionally “unsure now of who I was, where I belonged.”
“Honestly, it was brutal,” Shriver says in her new e book, “and I was terrified.”
The mother of 4 additionally made certain to have a good time her youngsters — Katherine, 35, Christina, 33, Patrick, 31, and Christopher, 27 — in “I Am Maria” for displaying “courage” in the course of the implosion of her marriage to their well-known father.
“Everything about their world and the sanctity of their home got uprooted in an instant,” she writes. “I do want to take a moment to acknowledge the grace, valor and courage my children exhibited.”
Shriver filed for divorce from Schwarzenegger, 77, in July 2011 after the “Terminator” star admitted to fathering a secret love baby with the household’s housekeeper, Mildred Baena, over a decade earlier.
The pair’s divorce was not finalized till December 2021.
Whereas Schwarzenegger welcomed Joseph Baena, now 27, in 1997 with the household’s housekeeper, Shriver didn’t study her husband’s different son till the actor confessed the key throughout a wedding counseling session in 2011.
“The reason I feel reluctant talking about it is because every time I do, it opens up the wounds again,” the previous governor of California stated within the Netflix documentary “Arnold” in 2023. “I think that I have caused enough pain for my family because of my f – – k up.”
“I am going to have to live with it the rest of my life,” he continued. “People will remember my successes and they will also remember my failures. This is a major failure.”
“I Am Maria” hits bookshelves on Tuesday, April 1.
