Donald and Shyamala divorced in 1972
When Kamala was nearly 5 years old, she knew her parents’ marriage was ending. Donald was teaching at Northwestern University in Illinois and when he was hired at the University of Wisconsin, Shyamala moved back to Northern California with their two children before the couple divorced in 1972.In her 2019 memoir, The Truths We Hold, Kamala wrote that she knew even as a child that her parents “loved each other very much, but it seemed like they had become like oil and water.”
“Had they been a little older, a little more emotionally mature, maybe the marriage could have survived. But they were so young,” she wrote.
Shyamala went on to raise Kamala and Maya “mostly on her own.”
In her vice presidential nomination acceptance speech, Kamala said her mother “worked around the clock to make it work” — packing their lunches in the early morning and helping them with homework when she returned from work.
