*Will Smith opened up about fatherhood in a rare conversation with wife Jada Pinkett Smith’s Facebook Watch series Red Table Talk.
The actor dished about “the real weight of parenting” the couple’s two children, Jaden, 21, and daughter 19-year-old Willow. He also shares 27-year-old son Trey, with ex-wife Sheree Fletcher.
“I brought him home, we put him in the bassinet, it was like stark terror,” Smith recalled of Trey’s birth, via PEOPLE. “I’m totally responsible for this life. I couldn’t stop going and checking. I just cried so hard. It makes me teary right now.”
When Jada asked why he cried, Will said: “I can’t do it. I’m not the guy. Oh man, I just knew I didn’t know nothing,” as he wiped away tears from his eyes. “Oh man, I’m going to need to get myself together. I’m going to have to walk this one off… I need a tissue. See I thought the red couch wouldn’t get me like this. The red table always gets you like this.”
He goes on to say, “It hit me how fragile parenting is. In that moment, I could see all the spectacular lessons my father had instilled in me, and I was like, there’s no way. I’m not that good.”
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On this special Father’s Day episode, Jada sits down with Will for one of the most intimate and vulnerable conversations the couple has ever shared. Streaming NOW https://t.co/qH54Q8TsQy pic.twitter.com/W3MOIbhxBl
— Red Table Talk (@RedTableTalk) June 21, 2020
When Trey was 2 year old, Smith and Fletcher called it quits. Smith said the “divorce was the worst thing in my adult life.”
“Divorce was the ultimate failure for me,” he added. “I’ve been hurt a lot in my adult life, but I don’t think anything touches the failure of getting divorced from my 2-year-old son’s mother. Sheree and I ran into that — if a man’s not a great husband, then he loses his parental rights.”
“I’m a way better father than I am a husband” he continued. “In that process, you start fighting for your rights, and the kid is in the middle.”
Adding, “Because of my own experience of seeing Daddy-O punch my mother, I knew my kids would never see me do anything violent toward their mother,” he said.
“But in the first couple years of Trey’s life, because Sheree and I were divorced, I think my desire to never have my son see me in that way made me more absent as a father,” he explained. “I wanted to create enough distance. We not gonna be cursing, fighting.”
Scroll up and watch Will and Jada’s full Father’s Day episode via the Facebook player above.
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