{"id":49871,"date":"2022-01-23T21:20:16","date_gmt":"2022-01-23T13:20:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hongkongliving.com\/?p=49871"},"modified":"2026-02-20T09:07:55","modified_gmt":"2026-02-20T09:07:55","slug":"visible-i-see-you-renate-boerner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hongkongliving.com\/visible-i-see-you-renate-boerner\/","title":{"rendered":"Life After loss: Renate on divorce, grief and raising resilient children"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>At 57 years young, soft-spoken Renate Boerner is a picture of elegance as she shares difficult stories of her marriage, divorce and coping with the loss of her children\u2019s father, who battled mental illness for many years. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Originally from Vancouver, Renate moved to Hong Kong at 23 as a journalist. She married her husband in 2000 and had two daughters, now 18 and 16. He unfortunately began to suffer from clinical depression, which deepened over their 12-year marriage. \u201cMental illness is so cruel. He was one person when we met, then gradually became a very different person. In the end, it was like living with a ghost, you can see their shell, but it\u2019s not the person you married. It\u2019s a horrific disease,\u201d she says. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>They sought professional help, together and apart, but the home environment became increasingly more difficult as his illness worsened. Renate recalls, \u201cHe was sometimes a very angry, scary person. I was constantly worried about what would set him off. I kept hoping he would get better, but he didn\u2019t.\u201d One day Renate arrived home and could feel seething anger. When she walked into the girls\u2019 room, she could see her daughters (then ages 6 and 8) were terrified. He left and their eldest burst into tears. Renate walked down the stairs and said to him, \u201cThat\u2019s enough; I\u2019m not doing this anymore.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Renate had a wake-up call: \u201cI wasn\u2019t modelling the kind of behaviours I wanted my daughters to learn. They deserve to be treated appropriately and respectfully. We were taught the nuclear family should be this 1950s, white-picket-fence kind of thing. It doesn\u2019t always work like that. I had to ask myself, what is the impact of staying on the kids?\u201d Describing the difficulty of divorce, she says, \u201cAs a mother, you spend so much time worrying about the kids. You need to be able to take care of them, so you may not have the space to think about what you want to be, what you want to do when you get through the tunnel. Sometimes you are in shock and pain, incredibly concerned about what the future will bring, and always your kids. My advice to others is that you will get to yourself; eventually it will be time for you.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Read more: <a href=\"https:\/\/hongkongliving.com\/visible-jill-carter-shines-a-spotlight-on-women-over-50\/\">Visible: Ex-Banking CEO pursues her Masters in Counselling at 70<\/a><\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p>Post-divorce, her ex-husband\u2019s mental health continued to decline. Eventually, he returned to his home country of Australia and lost the battle, taking his own life in 2019. Renate recalls, \u201cthe grieving process started a long time before his death. I kept hoping he would come back from the illness and have a relationship with his kids. That was another huge loss for all of us, the loss of dreams, of possibilities.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Renate sought various forms of therapy for the kids since the separation \u2013 play therapy, art therapy, talk therapy \u2013 and continued to utilise counselling for all of them to cope with his death. That support, along with her friends, colleagues and her beloved helper, gave Renate the tenacity to help the girls through their grief. \u201cNow that my kids are older, they understand their father was unwell, and they appreciate how we came together. In going through that, you model strength and resilience \u2013 \u2018this isn\u2019t going to beat me, and I\u2019m going to get back on my own two feet\u2019.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Life as a single mother hasn\u2019t been without challenges, but Renate was determined to make a safe, soothing, loving home for her and the girls. \u201cYou just get through it; you find a way. We moved to smaller and smaller places, and we made it work.\u201d Renate laughs, \u201cMost importantly, I managed to keep our helper with us.\u201d Renate used her creativity and moxy. In one flat, the girls\u2019 bedroom was so small it just fit an L-shaped bunk. Renate divided her bigger bedroom with IKEA wardrobes and used them to a build a wall with her helper. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t perfect, but it gave us the storage space we needed. I wanted our home to be a cozy place where we could relax. That was important.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Renate began working on her Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing in 2019 and is now writing a novel as part of her thesis. \u201cAt first, I wondered, am I too old to do this? But I thought, my dad is 89, what am I going to do for the next 30 years?\u201d And above all she aims to be a continuous source of inspiration and motivation for her daughters. What inspires her? \u201cSurvivors, the people who wake up and get out of bed every day \u2013 even when that seems impossible. They get through that day, and then they do it again. When you are lying in that bed it\u2019s hard to imagine a brighter day, to imagine the weight will lift, but it will, it does. Trust that you are enough, for yourself and your children. Trust that you will see yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At 57 years young, soft-spoken Renate Boerner is a picture of elegance as she shares difficult stories of her marriage, divorce and coping with the loss of her children\u2019s father, who battled mental illness for many years. Originally from Vancouver, Renate moved to Hong Kong at 23 as a journalist. She married her husband in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":49875,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7507],"tags":[7196,7396],"class_list":["post-49871","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lifestyle","tag-visible","tag-woman"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Life After loss: Renate on divorce, grief and raising resilient children - Hong Kong Living<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Renate shares her journey through divorce, grief and single motherhood in Hong Kong, and the resilience that helped her family rebuild.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/hongkongliving.com\/visible-i-see-you-renate-boerner\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Life After loss: Renate on divorce, grief and raising resilient children - 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