Belle Burden nearly lost everything in a dramatic divorce, but for her, the hardest part was the fallout her children faced.
Burden, an heiress who shared the story of her split from hedge fund executive Henry Davis in her book, “Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage,” made a recent appearance on Molly Sims’ podcast, “Lipstick on the Rim,” where she spoke about just how much her three kids were affected by her ex-husband’s actions.
Two of the children weren’t as immediately affected by the aftermath of the divorce — their oldest was staying with friends, and their middle child was in boarding school — but their youngest, Burden said, “really wanted a bedroom” at her father’s new apartment.
“She was sending him links on Pottery Barn for her room,” Burden explained of their daughter, who was 12 at the time. “And he just really held firm about he was done with that stage of his life where he would parent a child in that way, with homework and dinners and all that kind of stuff.”
As she recounted in her memoir, Davis told her that he wanted a divorce after she discovered he’d been having an affair. They’d been married for 20 years. He eventually moved into a two-bedroom apartment, then turned his spare bedroom into a home office.
“That’s been the hardest part of this, and the most lasting part,” Burden admitted.
When Sims and her co-host, Emese Gormley, expressed disbelief at Davis’ choice, Burden added, “I should be clear that it’s not a circumstance where he moved across the country and had a whole new family. He lives blocks away from us. He keeps in touch with the kids. He’s very kind and sweet with them. But he was very clear that he was not going to do the day-to-day, apply to college, all that kind of thing. And that really was like a switch going off.”
In her book, Burden explained that when their children were young, she devoted all her time and energy to raising them while Davis focused on his career, often joking, “I don’t do bath, bed or homework.” While he didn’t deal with the daily work of parenting, he did pay attention to them, she wrote, taking them on special outings and trips regularly.
But in one of the conversations they had shortly after he left her, Burden wrote that he told her, “You can have the house and the apartment. You can have custody of the kids. I don’t want it. I don’t want any of it.”
Burden had her lawyer send Davis a custody agreement, one that gave them each 50/50 custody, assuming he “would have realized his mistake” in not seeking more time with their children by then. Instead, she wrote, he “returned the document stripped of all his time, including vacations, holidays, weeks during the summer. He included only dinner on Thursday nights.”
She admitted that she believes he genuinely thought he was being “selfless” by not formalizing the agreement and that he argued their children were old enough to decide for themselves when they wanted to see him. For bigger moments, like when their son had surgery, she said that he showed up, but “for everyday issues, he responded with irritation.”
Sims asked Burden during her podcast whether Davis had ever spoken to her about what happened and why he distanced himself so firmly from her and their children.
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“The only things he’s ever said were right at the beginning,” she answered. “He said, ‘I felt like a switch went off. I feel like a switch has gone off.'”
About a year after the split, she said she texted him late one night seeking answers. “And he said, ‘I wish I had an answer for you. It’s not your fault. Something broke in me.’ And that’s the most I’ve gotten. And that’s where my head has to rest.”
She said that when she thinks about it, she envisions the switch going off, “but also like he was playing this role of husband and father, and he wanted to play it, and he was all in. And then, like an actor on a stage, he just was like, ‘I’m done with this role,’ takes off the costume, leaves the stage and can’t do it gracefully.”
Sims asked how the children are coping with not having Davis in their lives as a true father figure, and Burden said, “They are amazing because they love him, and they’re protective of him, and they’re actually very good now at reaching out to him to do things that are comfortable for him, like going to a hockey game or something like that.”
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She said they’re “wonderful in navigating that,” but added, “For me as a mother, I think the biggest challenge for me is to acknowledge their reality, to say ‘this is what’s happening, this is unusual, that you do not live with your dad’ … So I would say to my 12-year-old, ‘Your dad, I don’t know why, but he can’t create a home for you right now. And that has to do with him, and that’s not you.'”
As for Davis’ reaction to the book’s release, Burden admitted that she’s heard he’s “not happy.”
She first published a snippet of her story in an essay for a column in The New York Times, which he had to sign off on — she said she thought “he didn’t really see anything wrong with the narrative, like, you’re a man, you’re allowed to leave in this way.” But now that, as Sims put it, “the whole world, every woman in America hates you,” he’s “surprised.”
“He said, ‘I don’t think I come off well in this,'” Burden shared.
