Adele's "My Little Love" Has A Heartbreaking Message About Divorce For Her Son

You might want to sit down for this one. Moments after Adele dropped her highly-anticipated fourth studio album, 30, on Friday, Nov. 19, fans immediately took to Twitter not only to share the lyrics that made them emotional wrecks, but also to point out favorite songs on the record. While “I Drink Wine,” “Woman Like Me,” and “Easy On Me” (of course) made the cut, it’s “My Little Love” that has everyone spiraling. The song is indeed about divorce, heartbreak, and motherhood, and it features a raw, deeply personal exchange between Adele and her 9-year-old son Angelo, who she shares with ex-husband Simon Konecki.

At first, the song sounds like an innocently sweet enough love letter to her only child. “My little love, I see your eyes widen like an ocean,” she sings. Yet, seconds into the track, Adele takes a left turn and directly addresses just how challenging it is to explain divorce to someone so young, when she herself is grappling with its aftermath. She sings, “I’m finding it hard to be here sincerely. I know you feel lost, it’s my fault completely.”

While that’s enough to make anyone pat their chest and pout their lips with empathy, it’s the voice exchange Adele and Angelo share throughout the song that sets “My Little Love” apart from any other on 30. Here it is below:

Adele: “Tell me you love me.”

Angelo: “I love you a million percent ... I feel like you don’t love me.”

Adele: “Why do you feel like that?

Angelo: “Do you like me?”

Adele: “You know mommy doesn’t like anyone else like I like you, right?”

Adele: “Mommy’s been having a lot of big feelings recently.”

Angelo: “Like, how?”

Adele: “Just like … my feelings are trapped. Like, um, I feel a bit confused.”

Angelo: “Why?”

Adele: “I don’t know. Like I don’t really know what I’m doing.”

Angelo. “Oh, at all?”

Adele: “At all.”

Angelo: “And that would make me go…”

Woven between the painfully honest lyrics and melodies, Adele continues telling Angelo, “I love your dad ‘cause he gave you to me. You’re half me and you’re half daddy.” As if that weren’t personal enough, she ends the track with a super sad outro and voice memo to herself, in which she expresses the complexities of her emotions. She says:

“I’m having a bad day. I’m having a very anxious day. I feel very paranoid. I feel very stressed. I have a hangover, which never helps, but I feel like today is the first day since I left him that I feel lonely, and I never feel lonely. I love being on my own. I always preferred being on my own than being with people. And I feel, like, maybe a bit like overcompensating and being out and stuff like that to keep my mind off of it. And I feel today I’m home, and I want to be at home. I just wanna watch TV and curl up in a ball and be in my sweats and stuff like that. I just feel really lonely. I feel a bit frightened that I might feel like this a lot.”

During Adele’s Nov. 14 One Night Only concert special and interview with Oprah Winfrey, she opened up about reckoning with her decision to divorce Konecki, and feeling embarrassed about having walked away from marriage. “It may seem like I don’t now, you know, it’s almost like I’ve disrespected it by getting married and then divorced so quickly … I’m just embarrassed that I didn’t make my marriage work. You know?” she said. “I just, from a very young age, promised myself that when I have kids that we’d stay together, we will be that united family.”

Adele continued, “I tried for a really, really long time and then I was just so disappointed for my son. I was so disappointed for myself. I thought I was going to be the one that stopped doing those bloody patterns all the time.”

Despite her exhausting post-divorce journey, Adele proves throughout 30 that she’s grown so much in the past few years, and that aside from loving Angelo, self-care and self-love have been her top priority.

Read Adele’s “My Little Love” lyrics in full below, courtesy of Genius:

[Verse 1]

My little love

I see your eyes widen like an ocean

When you look at me so full of my emotions

I'm findin' it hard to be here sincerely

I know you feel lost, it's my fault completely

[Verse 2]

I don't recognize myself in the coldness of the daylight

So I ain't surprised you can read through all of my lies

I feel so bad to be here when I'm so guilty

I'm so far gone and you're the only one who can save mе

[Chorus]

I'm holdin' on (barely)

Mama's got a lot to learn (It's heavy)

I'm holdin' on (catch me)

Mama's got a lot to learn (teach me)

[Verse 3]

My little love

Tell me, do you, you feel the way my past aches?

When you lay on me, can you hear the way my heart breaks?

I wanted you to have everything I never had

I'm so sorry if what I've done makes you feel sad

[Chorus]

I'm holdin' on (barely)

Mama's got a lot to learn (It's heavy)

I'm holdin' on (catch me)

Mama's got a lot to learn (teach me)