A little more than four years after her and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s divorce was officially finalized, Maria Shriver opens up about the “brutal” split from the actor/former politician.
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In an excerpt obtained by People, Shriver reflects on her marriage and very public divorce in her new book of poetry, I Am Maria. She met Schwarzenegger while working at a local TV station after graduating from Georgetown University.
She claimed he quickly swept her off her feet. “Thirty-year-old Arnold Schwarzenegger looked and sounded different from anyone I’d ever met,” Maria wrote. “My attraction to him was instantaneous. Like me, Arnold was also in the Big Expectations business. He told me, ‘I want you to go for it, and I won’t stop you—because I want to go for it, too.’ It was a turn-on.”
Admittedly, Maria said her family was shocked about the relationship. She noted that no one understood her attraction to Arnold. “After all, Arnold was a Republican, a bodybuilder, and he wanted to be a movie star,” she recalled. “He lived in a two-bedroom apartment and wore a Speedo. And with time, I made another decision: to take a shot at being in front of the camera.”
In 1986, Maria Shriver and Arnold Schwarzenegger got married. They had four children, including Katherine and Patrick. Things took a turn for the couple when Schwarzenegger decided to run for governor of California. At the time, she was working for NBC News. She decided to follow her husband’s ambitious goals.
“I came up with a new plan: I’ll become an amazing First Lady of California!” she declared. “Oh, and I’ll be home every night for dinner.”
She was First Lady of California from November 2003 to January 2011.
Things Fell Apart For Maria Shriver in 2009 When Her Mother Died
However, she experienced multiple heartbreaks during her time in politics, starting with her mother, Eunice Kennedy, dying in 2009. Her father then passed away, and it was later discovered that Arnold had an affair with their housekeeper, which led to the birth of his son, Joseph Baena.
“Then a year and a half later, all hell seemed to break loose,” Maria revealed. “My First Lady job came to an end. My father died. And then came another devastating, life-altering blow: my twenty-five-year-long marriage blew up. It broke my heart, it broke my spirit, it broke what was left of me.”
She admitted that without her marriage, her parents, and a job, the “dam” of her lifelong capital-D Denial just blew apart.
“Now, much has been written about the end of my marriage, and frankly, I don’t feel like I need or want to discuss it here, or anywhere,” Marie acknowledged. “That said, I do want to take a moment to acknowledge the grace, valor, and courage my children exhibited. Everything about their world and the sanctity of their home got uprooted in an instant.”
She then shared she was consumed with grief and wracked with confusion, anger, fear, sadness, and anxiety. “I was unsure now of who I was, where I belonged. Honestly, it was brutal, and I was terrified.”
Writing Poetry Helped Her Become the Woman She Desperately Wanted to Be
Despite the situation, Maria turned to writing to help her through it all. She noted that writing poetry helped her find a woman who was terrified of not being able to live up to her family’s legacy and was scared of not being big enough, a good-enough daughter, sister, wife, mother, and journalist.
“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,” she added. “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.”
I Am Maria is to be published on Apr. 1.