After the Landslide: Divorce, Grief, and Returning to the Child Within
- The Broken & Beautiful
- Jan 11
- 5 min read
Updated: Jan 13
You probably have your own reason for loving the song Landslide by Fleetwood Mac. Many of us hear it and remember a love we have lost. For me, it always reminded me of simpler times. Both are true, and there is more. The best songs strike different chords with different listeners. If you need a reminder of why you love this timeless song, I invite you to stop, listen, and remember.
Divorce is a Landslide
As I surveyed its landscape while writing this article, certain lines from Landslide surfaced at different moments, each naming a part of my divorce process I did not yet have language for. Taken together, these lyrics trace what grief actually asked of me: honesty, patience, and a return to the parts of myself that had gone quiet long before the collapse.
What I believe this song is ultimately about is not just loss, but who we lose before a catastrophe and who we slowly uncover after the dust has settled.
Let me explain.
“Oh, mirror in the sky, what is love?”
I remember exactly what my landslide looked like. The day after she left, I slid into my bed and did not leave it for a month. I lost twenty pounds. I had some of the darkest, most obsessive thoughts I have ever known.
If you have been through a divorce, you know how completely it shatters certainty. Love stops being a feeling and becomes a question, one you scream into the void when the life you built no longer reflects back at you.
More than six years have passed since that day. I have leaned on many songs for companionship along the way. A good song can become a quiet companion in a rebuild when you can’t find the answers you’re desperately seeking. It pulls truth out of you like nothing else can.
Through music, I have come to recognize the relationships where I experienced love in its truest form. Those moments are rare, but they are also the sweetest, and often carry the greatest heartache.
As for love’s ultimate purpose, I am sure I will never stop asking the mirror in the sky its meaning.
(I hope you don't, either.)
“Can the child within my heart rise above?”
If you have ever been in therapy, you have likely had a conversation about your childhood self. At one point in my own therapy journey, I created a large collage of images spanning from childhood through the end of my marriage. It helped me remember who I was during each season of my life. My childhood self quickly became the central focus.
Healing does not begin with ignoring the past and moving on. It begins with listening, especially to the inner child. That idea can feel vulnerable or uncomfortable, but I would encourage anyone navigating divorce to push gently past that resistance.
The inner child is not the weakness in the aftermath of loss. They are the compass, quietly guiding us away from what feels unsafe and back toward what still matters.
“Can I sail through the changin’ ocean tides? Can I handle the seasons of my life?”
There is no single right way to process a divorce. If you are still reading this, you are handling it. That matters.
I have had to let countless should haves, could haves, and would haves drift past without grabbing hold. Many were ignored for a long time. There are endless ways to distract yourself, some socially acceptable and many deeply unhealthy.
We are the sum of who we have been across these seasons, and we rarely see ourselves clearly while we are inside them. That is true whether we feel prepared or not. The current never settles into a place of full control.
There is no straight path forward, only shifting tides and recurring seasons that ask for adaptability, not mastery.
Seasons come.
People change.
We change.
Relationships end.
Seasons go.
I will not pretend I have handled the tides or seasons of my life particularly well. I can say, honestly, that my perspective improved once I became more acquainted with my childhood self. After all, he has been here as long as I can remember.
When you are caught in a storm, it helps to have a copilot who has seen every version of you.
“I’ve been ’fraid of changin’ ’cause I’ve built my life around you.”
Like many of you reading this, I tried to hold my marriage together out of fear.
Fear of what my church would say.
Fear of losing my relationship with God.
Fear of the impact on my children.
But when a landslide happens, it simply happens. No amount of preparation makes you ready. I woke up one morning and the life I had lived for twenty years was gone. The road I had been traveling was no longer an option.
When we talk about divorce casually, it is hard to explain how completely it alters the world around you. A landslide offers a fitting parallel. It does not just block a road. It reshapes the entire landscape. Ignoring that reality would do a disservice to this song and to the experience itself.
When decades, children, faith, and identity are woven into one shared life, unraveling it is complex and slow. There is no quick fix for something that once held everything together.
We all have our own stories, but a landslide is a landslide.
“But time makes you bolder. Even children get older. And I’m gettin’ older, too.”
There is a quiet boldness that comes from remembering who you were before your marriage. Since my divorce, I have spoken with many others who survived their own landslides. The details differ, but the wisdom is consistent: take the time to love yourself again.
For me, that process began with grief. I would argue that the first step toward self-love is allowing grief to be present, not as something to escape, but as a long lost companion.
I found my inner child buried deep in that rubble. With him came the realization that a fundamental trust had been broken. I am still not sure who needed to trust whom, but as that bond slowly mended, a truer version of myself began to emerge.
That has required revisiting moments where grief still lingers. Over time, trust in myself was rebuilt not by erasing the past, but by carrying it forward more honestly.
Honesty begins with our most trustworthy reflection. Loving ourselves means existing in the before, during and after of grief. Our inner child waits for us with loving arms in all of those stages and seasons.
Oh, mirror in the sky, what is love?
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