Gisele's Honest Confession About Tom Brady, Stepchild
In 2007, when supermodel Gisele Bündchen found out that her new boyfriend Tom Brady’s ex, Bridget Moynahan, was pregnant with his child, she considering walking out. “It was a challenging thing because here I am, you know, thinking, I’m dating this guy, we met, and we started dating and everything is great and then this happens,” Bündchen told CBS This Morning’s Charlie Rose Tuesday. “So, then I felt like I didn’t know what to do. It was kind of one of those moments of like, ‘Do I just run away?’”
Today, Bündchen and Brady are married with two kids of their own — Benjamin, 5, and Vivian, 2 — and they’re also co-parents to Brady and Moynahan’s son John, 8. "I think, now, eight years later, I couldn’t have asked for a sweeter bonus child,” Bündchen told Rose.
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And despite what could have been a contemptuous relationship between Brady-Bündchen and Moynahan, who’s newly married to New York businessman Andrew Frankel, their co-parenting arrangement seems to work quite well. “My son has two loving parents in an extended family, whether it’s cousins or stepmothers or boyfriends,” Moynahan told More magazine in 2011. “My son is surrounded by love.”
Amy Morin, a psychotherapist and author of 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do, tells Yahoo Parenting that the key to good co-parenting is ongoing, healthy communication. “It’s important for parents to be able to share what’s going on in a child’s life and in their home,” she says. “The other parent needs to know if you’re moving in with someone or if you’ve heard from the teacher that there are problems at school.”
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Focusing on the child, and not the parents’ inter-personal relationships with each other, is also essential. “The goal is pretty simple: Put your children first,” Dr. Robert E. Emery, professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, tells Yahoo Parenting. “The trick can be dealing with your own emotions, like anger and the hurt, pain, and grief that often lie behind [a separation].” But parents must move past their own issues. “There are not two or three or four sides when parents live apart,” says the author of the forthcoming book Two Homes, One Childhood: A Parenting Plan to Last a Lifetime. “There is only one side, the child’s side. You want to be on that side.”
And then there are the logistics, like transporting kids’ stuff to each other’s homes without griping or standing amicably together on the sidelines of a game. “I urge parents to act like parents, even if it’s an act, so kids can get to be kids,” Emery says.
Moynahan, Bündchen and Brady have been photographed together over the years at John’s sports games, or during drop-offs where Bündchen and Moynahan often share a hug. These demonstrations of friendship and even affection among the parental figures in his life are good for John. “It’s in the best interest of the child for everyone to maintain healthy relationships,” Morin says, adding that step-parents who view themselves as a support parent, as opposed to a rival to the biological parent, have the strongest relationships with their stepchildren.
“I want every kid to have a childhood,” says Emery. “From what I hear, Bündchen, Brady, and Moynahan are giving their children the childhood they deserve.”
(Photo of Tom Brady, Gisele Bündchen, and Bridget Moynahan: Splash News)
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