Women in Leadership

Marie Mosley was a mom at fourteen and stayed twenty-five years. She left with two master's degrees, four children, and a plan. Here is how she made the exit while still showing up for work.

Marie Mosley: Leaving a Toxic Marriage While Working

By Rosie Zilinskas | November 4, 2022 | 11 min read

Marie Mosley is a school counselor, a coach, and the author of Pretty Divorce: How To Sever A Toxic Union and Create an Illuminated Future. She became a mother at fourteen, stayed in a physically and emotionally abusive relationship for twenty-five years, and left at thirty-eight with a bachelor's degree in psychology, a master's in guidance and counseling, and a master's in educational leadership. She raised four children through it and is now remarried, with two grandsons.

I invited Marie on the No Woman Left Behind podcast for a reason most career shows would avoid. Some of the women listening are working full time, carrying a family, and living inside a relationship that is hurting them. I know that because I was one of them. My divorce ran more than three years and went to trial while I was climbing the corporate ladder with two small children. Marie and I had both normalized what we were living in, and we both got out without giving up our careers. This conversation is about how.

If you are in immediate danger, call 911. In the United States, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233 (SAFE) and thehotline.org. Everything below is two women's lived experience, not legal or medical advice.

What does Marie Mosley mean by a pretty divorce?

A pretty divorce is not a tidy one. Marie's own divorce was not tidy, and neither was mine. The word describes the outcome, not the process.

"So many women say they're stuck. They stay stuck even if they get a divorce. They're angry and bitter. They don't find that resolve to move on, feel good about themselves and understand that this is an opportunity to get the life that they want."

Marie Mosley

Marie's definition is personal to each woman. For her it was writing a book. For me it was building a business and hosting this show. For someone else it may simply be peace of mind. She also stretches the word past marriage: you can have a pretty divorce from alcohol, from negative behavior, from a mindset that does not serve you. The second meaning of divorce, she points out, is separating yourself from something. That is the whole idea.

She is careful about one thing. She is not telling anyone to run out and get divorced. Some things can be worked out, and family counseling is a real option. Her point is that every woman needs to find out honestly where she is, and if the answer is that the relationship is toxic, staying stuck is not the only choice.

Why a working professional does not always recognize abuse

This is the part of the episode I most wanted on the record, because it happened to both of us.

When I finally sat down with an attorney and described my marriage, she told me I was a classic example of a domestic violence abuse victim. I was shocked. I remember thinking, I am a working professional, how can I be a domestic violence victim? Nothing had been hidden from my family. I had not been aware that what I was living was abuse. Things got thrown. There was fear. I had normalized it.

Marie described the same pattern from the inside.

"I believe that when you are in those relationships, you try to normalize it but act like, 'This is how we communicate or operate with each other.' It's ridiculous."

Marie Mosley

Her most direct line in the whole conversation was about the assumption that abuse has to leave a mark.

"Many women do not think they're in a domestic violence situation. If it's not physical, then it's not but no. I'm telling you, there are emotional abuse, mental abuse and living in fear."

Marie Mosley

Two things keep capable women from seeing it. The first is the red flags they explained away early on. Marie talks about the slammed object at the restaurant that everyone remembers afterward. I had red flags before my wedding and told myself we would figure it out. The second is what Marie calls the functional-addict version of a marriage. You go to work. You pay the bills. The kids are eating. So you tell yourself you are okay. Functioning is not the same as being well.

Being good at your job is not evidence that your home is safe. It can be the very thing that hides the problem.

How do you leave a toxic marriage while working full time?

I asked Marie for two actionable tips for women who are trying to manage a toxic relationship while continuing to work. She pushed back on the word manage, and that reframe is the answer.

"I would not be managing the toxic relationship. I'd be figuring out, 'How am I going to make my exit?'"

Marie Mosley

Here is the sequence she laid out, in her order.

1. 1Decide what you actually want. Marie says some women get comfortable, normalize it, and learn to function inside it until it becomes their thing. The first step is an honest answer to one question: do I want to be out of this?
2. 2Tell someone with an objective interest in you. A therapist, a social worker, or your regular doctor. Marie's point is that people have no idea how much a physician can direct you once you are honest about what is going on at home. They can refer you, and they know you.
3. 3Find a place to land, even temporarily. Marie moved in with her mother for a while. I moved in with my parents when I left, then rented, then bought. If you have to live with a friend to get peace and safety, she says, that is okay. That is the first step.
4. 4Inventory your resources and sketch the plan. Do you have money saved? Who can watch the kids? Where can you find after-school care? Marie's warning here is personal: she moved from New York to Florida to get away from her ex-husband, he followed, she fell for it, and they bought a house together before she had to move back. A plan is what keeps you from doing it twice.

The doctor step deserves its own paragraph, because it changed both of our lives. My obstetrician, the same woman who delivered my son, was the one who told me I needed to leave a terrible marriage. She was the catalyst. When I said that on the show, Marie laughed, because it is in her book: it was her GYN who gave her the information that said, this is not okay for you. Two women, two OB-GYNs, the same door out.

Keeping your career while you get out

Marie was thirty-eight and working when she left. Her two oldest were grown; her two youngest were still at home, and her son was about ten. She was also going back to school at night, getting home at eleven. She could do that because her mother was alive and helped raise her kids, which meant she knew they were safe, fed, and cared for while she moved.

She is honest that not every reader has that. So the question becomes: what are your resources? Her list from the episode, all things she used or saw as a counselor:

• Family who can take the kids on the nights you are working late or in class.
• After-school programs, which many schools run for exactly this kind of transition.
• A childcare swap with another mother. Marie's girlfriend was part of her support system. She watched her daughter; her friend watched hers.
• Scholarships and discounts from sports and extracurricular organizations, many of which offer them to single moms.
• Coaches and team environments for a son whose home team, in her words, was a little bit skewed.

The obstacle to using any of these is shame. Marie says it plainly: when you are going through this you feel isolated and embarrassed, and the more masks and facades you wear at work, the less you want anyone to know what is happening behind closed doors. You have to get past that or you stay in a silo.

"We cannot stay in a silo by ourselves and suffer in silence anymore."

Marie Mosley

I want to say something to the woman who is climbing at work while this is going on at home, because I was her. I kept my career moving through a three-year divorce because I had two kids who needed me to. Education and a job were the fallback that gave me options, and Marie says her degrees were exactly what let her hold herself up and leave. That is one of the reasons this show pushes so hard on career advancement. It is not about the title. It is about never being dependent on a situation that hurts you.

Why she kept going back, and what finally stopped it

Marie tried to get out several times before it held. Every time she was doing well, her ex found his way back, did something worse, and she had to start over. What ended the cycle was not a bigger reason to leave. It was a boundary.

"Once I put some boundaries in place, stuck to my guns and refused to turn back is when I saw the most progress."

Marie Mosley

She is specific about the script that pulls women back: the kids, the companionship, the belief that no one else will want a woman with four children. She calls that last one a delusion we tell ourselves, and she says it kept her stuck for years. My version was simpler. Once I ended a relationship, it was done, because I had ended it for a reason. Whichever you are, the boundary has to be decided in advance, before he shows up at the door with a better version of himself.

Forgiveness without reconciliation

The book talks about boundaries and forgiveness together, so I asked Marie the obvious question: forgiving whom?

Herself first. She beat herself up for years over why she stayed when she knew better and had a family that would have supported her. Then him. She thought about the fact that he was sixteen when they got together, without good role models, and she found a way to let go of the anger, not to justify anything but because the bitterness was, in her words, like chains of weight around her neck.

"Forgiveness does not mean I have to have a relationship with the person. It means I have the freedom from my being and their being so that I can progress and not be held to the trauma and the past of what happened."

Marie Mosley

We compared notes on what that looked like with the kids. I bought gifts every Christmas and birthday for my children to give their father, and people criticized me for it. It was never for him. It was so my kids could hand their dad a present. Marie sent milestone photos and first-day-of-school pictures and pushed her children to keep a relationship with their father, even when he and his new wife did not want it. Her rule: you do your due diligence, and then you let go. You freed your heart so it can be open again, and you did your part.

She also made her children's healing a priority, and she says every mother should. If you took your kids through the toxicity and the divorce with you, it is your responsibility to take them on the healing journey too. As a counselor she had watched what happens when a mother does not, and she used everything she knew from work at home.

The character trait Marie says it takes

I asked what traits get a woman through this. Her answer was courage, and then a word most of us flinch at.

"We need to be courageous and sometimes selfish, not in a dogmatic way but we do have to consider ourselves. We can't always consider everything outside of us before we consider ourselves because if we're no good, we're no good to anybody."

Marie Mosley

She is not describing a woman who abandons her responsibilities. She is describing a mother who is angry all the time, snapping at her kids, and telling herself she is staying for them. That is not doing anything for the kids. Being a little selfish, in Marie's sense, is what makes you useful to everyone else again.

We are great and powerful, and sometimes we give our power away to people who do not deserve it. Taking it back is a decision.

That last idea is the bridge between Marie's story and everything else on this site. The Articulation Gap is the distance between the impact you create and the impact leadership recognizes and rewards. Closing it takes Conviction: owning what you know and directing it to the people who decide. Marie's exit ran on the same muscle. She stopped living someone else's version of her life and directed her energy, her education, and her income toward the one she wanted. If you have been white-knuckling your career while everything at home is on fire, the first act of conviction may not be at work at all.

Marie Mosley's final words

"Sometimes we give our power away to people that don't deserve it. We give everything that we have, and it's okay. Most of us have done that, and we have to know when it's time for us to pick up the pieces of our life and put them back together the way we see fit, and not live the life somebody else wants for us, but go after the one we want for ourselves."

Marie Mosley

About Marie Mosley

Marie Mosley is a school counselor, coach, speaker, and the author of Pretty Divorce: How To Sever A Toxic Union and Create an Illuminated Future. Her book follows her life from early family losses and teenage motherhood through a twenty-five-year toxic relationship, and out the other side to a career, a healthy marriage, four children, and two grandsons. She is on a mission to show other women how to experience a pretty divorce.

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