What if the way back to yourself started with getting your head under water? That's the question at the heart of this episode of Divorce Happens, where Olivia talks with Kate Washington — a Sacramento-based writer, former dining critic, and author of two deeply personal memoirs: Already Toast: Caregiving and Burnout in America, and her brand-new release, Midstream: A Life Remade in 50 Swims. Kate's byline has appeared in the New York Times, Time, and HuffPost, but this conversation isn't about her résumé. It's about the year she turned a personal challenge — swim in fifty different bodies of water before her fiftieth birthday — into the roadmap for finally leaving a twenty-three-year marriage that had quietly hollowed her out.
Kate's story complicates the narrative around divorce and caregiving in exactly the way this show exists to do. For years, she was the primary caregiver not only for her two daughters but for her then-husband through a severe cancer diagnosis — carrying, as she puts it, the vast bulk of the mental load in a marriage that was quietly draining her. The 50 Dunks Project started as something playful, a way to reclaim the joy and childhood wonder she'd lost somewhere along the way. But immersing herself, literally, in rivers, hot springs, and the waters of southern France became something more: a practice of embodiment, presence, and boundary-setting in a life that had none. Kate shares the test that ultimately helped her decide to separate — asking herself whether she'd tell her own daughter to stay in a marriage like hers — and speaks candidly about the guilt of choosing divorce while her ex-husband was still chronically ill, and the very real grief her daughters carried alongside her.
The episode closes on the note this show always returns to: divorce is not the crisis it's made out to be — it's often the exit from one. Kate's final swim, on her fiftieth birthday, with both daughters at her favorite spot on the South Yuba River, becomes a quiet, hard-won reconciliation after years of pain neither of them chose. Her message to anyone circling the decision to leave an unhappy marriage is direct: the freedom on the other side comes sooner than you'd think, and it is worth it. Listeners will walk away with two practical takeaways for starting over after divorce — a simple gut-check question for evaluating whether a marriage is serving you, and a reminder that reclaiming joy, in almost any small form, is never a frivolous first step toward midlife reinvention.
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