Wicked star Ethan Slater’s ex-wife Lilly Jay breaks silence on his affair with Ariana Grande

Ethan Slater’s ex-wife Lilly Jay wrote an essay detailing her painful divorce and how her former high school sweetheart is moving on with Ariana Grande.

In an essay for The Cut published Thursday, the clinical psychologist, who shares a two-year-old son with Slater, reflected on navigating life as a single mother and the end of her more than decade-long relationship.

“I’ve learned that motherhood fills your time, but not your mind,” she wrote. “In the countless hours I spend rocking my son to sleep, pushing his stroller, and admiring his sweaty hands clutching a crayon, I work diligently on my private project: coming to terms with the sudden public demise of my wedding.’

She continued, “This, I tell myself, is nothing to be ashamed of and nothing to hide.”

Over time, the mother of one said that she “believes that in the absence of the life” she had planned with her long-time love, she understands that she has a “life full of sweetness” from their child.

She also reflected on the fact that no one “gets married thinking they’re going to get divorced, just like we don’t board a plane expecting it to crash.”

‘But I never actually thought I would get a divorce. Especially not right after the birth of my first child and especially not in the shadow of my husband’s new relationship with a celebrity,” Jay noted, referring to his relationship with Grande.

She further wrote: ‘In this period of shock and grief, over a year after the end of my marriage was made public, I deeply miss the life of invisibility that I have created for myself as a psychologist specializing in mental health of women.’

Jay explained that while “people out [her] Past contacted saying they had seen my face in a tabloid and her patients had kept quiet about it.

“At Children’s Hospital, my invisibility was a welcome protection from hard conversations for me and my patients,” she said. “And while I still firmly believe in following my patients’ directions and not assuming I know which parts of my personality resonate with them, the publicity I didn’t consent to increasingly feels like both a challenge and an opportunity.”

‘If I am discovered, what then, be vulnerable? – perhaps it could be a correlation rather than a clinical liability,” she added.

At her lowest, she said she “feared that loss of control and postpartum depression would destroy her for her entire adult life.”

“If I can’t be invisible anymore, I might as well introduce myself,” she told readers. ‘You know how a sponge absorbs liquid most effectively when it’s already slightly wet? Maybe we can think about my messy, not-so-personal life in that way: a dose of my own loss, anger, powerlessness, sadness that helps me hold on to yours.’

Slater, 32, started dating Grande, 31, following his split from Jay (pictured together last month)