Tish Cyrus is getting vulnerable.
During her 30-year marriage to ex-husband Billy Ray Cyrus, both she and Billy Ray filed for divorce on separate occasions over a decade before their official split in 2022. Now, Tish is sharing how it was the initial years of the COVID-19 pandemic—during which her husband went to Tennessee and Tish was alone in their California home for two years—that finally gave her the strength to leave her marriage.
"During that period, I took a really good, hard look at life, my life, and like, 'What was I gonna do?'" she told Alex Cooper during the Feb. 7 episode of Call Her Daddy, adding of her relationship, "Because it had not been in a good place for a long time. And I think I did stay so long out of fear of being alone. Like I had met him when I was 23, 24."
She continued, "So being alone, and all of a sudden just having kind of the weight of the world off my shoulders, and I was able to just breathe. And smoke pot and garden, and go skinny dipping in my pool. That's what I did during covid. It was hugely transformative."
But just as she was learning how to thrive while being on her own, tragedy struck: Her mom passed away in August 2020.
"I was alone during that time, I had to go through it alone, and I literally can't believe I did that," Tish reflected. "It was so crazy, my two biggest fears in life were being alone and my mom passing away. And I had one month of a complete psychological breakdown. It was the worst thing, it was not good. I just kind of pushed the mom thing under the rug, and then the divorce thing came."
She added, "I could not eat, I could not sleep, I could not stop crying. I don't have my mom, and then I don't have my husband that has been my husband for 30 years. Like I'm scared."
But in the years since her divorce and her mom's passing, Tish has once again found happiness in love with Dominic Purcell. She and the Prison Break actor tied the knot in a Malibu ceremony in August 2023, for which her and Billy Ray's daughter Miley Cyrus, 30, was present (the former couple are also parents to Brandi, 36, Trace, 34, Braison, 29, and Noah, 23).
Notably, the "Flowers" singer was absent when her father married singer Firerose in October 2023.
But when looking back on her decades with Billy Ray, Tish tries not to dwell on what could have been if she'd made different decisions.
"I really didn't want Noah to still be young," she explained when asked if she wished she'd left her marriage earlier, "but looking back on it, it would have been much better for her had I left."
For more on the complicated histories of the Cyrus family, keep reading.