For years, Welcome to Plathville has given viewers a look into the behind the scenes of the Plaths, a deeply religious family whose nine children are very quickly growing up and finding their own paths. While the early seasons of the reality TV show focused on the family’s musical ambitions and how they’d perform as one large group, the TLC series has since expanded to cover much more, delving more deeply into the members’ personal relationships.

Since the show debuted on TLC in 2019, several of the Plath children have since become adults and moved out of the home to start their own independent lives. In more recent news, the parents of the family, Kim and Barry, announced that they would be officially separating from one another—and now Kim has finally opened up about how challenging the split was for her.

Kim Had A Rough Patch After The Divorce

Longtime viewers of the show will surely recall Kim as a very talkative and bubbly figure onscreen, while patriarch Barry tended to be much more reserved. At times, their personalities seemed at odds with one another, but somehow they were able to make it work, raising nine children on their farm, with Kim as the homemaker.

However, last summer, Kim made a jaw-dropping decision when she announced she wanted to separate from her husband, filing for divorce in June of 2024. At the time, Kim explained that Barry felt emotionally distant, and that their marriage hadn’t felt like a true union in quite a while.

As reported by Us Weekly, the couple released a joint statement announcing their official separation last June:

Since then, Kim has faced more than her share of issues transitioning to the single life. Viewers of the show will recall that, at one point, she moved her three youngest daughters into a houseboat that lacked space and basic amenities, making fans call into question her parental decision-making.

At another point, Kim was even charged with drinking and driving. She admitted that she made “some bad decisions one night” and “ended up getting a DUI.” At the very least, Kim swore this was a one-time incident that she didn’t foresee happening again. That said, it only served to make a rough time in her life even rougher.

“That was a really hard year for me because it happened right as I was kind of starting to get, you know, my new life established,” she said. “And I just made everything really, really difficult,” she added. When it came to moving forward with her life, she explained that it was hard to be out in the world, as Barry was the one between them who had more practical experience. “He has a career, and I spent 25 years supporting him in his career because I’ve been raising kids for 25 years,” she pointed out.

Kim Says Barry Hasn’t Been There For Her Emotionally

For his part, Barry has been largely absent from the mix. Though he remains in touch with his children, viewers of the show will recall that he’s gotten extremely into his fitness routine, sometimes spending hours a day exercising.

Kim reports that her ex-husband hasn’t been helpful at all in the difficult transition of their separation. She acknowledged that she wished Barry had checked up on her at some point, especially during her struggles with drinking, but that he never did. Kim elaborated on how she had hoped Barry would communicate with her:

Despite it all, it would appear that Kim has managed to find a way forward in this next chapter of her life. Not long after her separation from Barry, in fact, she found love in someone new. She and her now-boyfriend, a man named Ken Palmer, quickly fell into a relationship after they met, and he even made an appearance on the show.

A large part of Kim’s arc in the last season was managing her family members’ reactions to her new partner. In their confessionals to the cameras, many of her children expressed that they were lukewarm about, if not skeptical of, Ken dating their mother, and it was clear that some of them thought it was too soon for her to be moving on after her divorce. It seems, however, that the pair is still going strong.