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The first episode of Red Table Talk, Jada Pinkett Smith, Adrienne Banfield-Norris and Willow Smith’s Facebook Watch show, is finally here. The women introduced the series with an episode in honor of Mother’s Day, and they discussed decisions they made as moms, Willow’s hopes as a future parent, and what they learned from Jada’s co-parenting relationship with Sheree Fletcher. Sheree is the mother of Will’s first child, Trey.
Jada had the chance to talk one on one with Sheree about the ups and downs of that relationship in the episode, and things definitely started out rough between the two women back in the day.
“Here’s the one thing I will say in hindsight. Because I did not understand marriage, I did not understand divorce, I probably should have fell back,” Jada said about she would have changed about how she went about entering into a co-parenting situation with Will and Sheree.
“I feel like when Will and I first started dating, I had this thing in my mind,” she said. “‘You did this and that’s done.’ That’s where I was wrong.”
Looking back and reevaluating “my insensitivities,” and “my inconsideration,” Jada feels bad because she couldn’t fully understand then that Will and Sheree were “trying to unwind a marriage.”
Because of that, the women bumped heads, even engaging in verbal spats. In one incident, where Sheree called Will and Jada’s house, things got really ugly.
“You picked up the phone and I wasn’t really respectful,” Sheree remembered. “Trey’s at the house, so I’m calling to talk to Trey, but I had to go through you to get to him. You answered the phone. So you let me know, ‘I don’t really appreciate your tone.’ I was like, ‘I don’t care.’ And you hung up on me.”
“I called back and I happened to say, quote, ‘B—h, you living in the house, I picked out,'” she continued. “You said, ‘It’s my house now.'”
Thankfully, that was a situation the women could laugh about in the present day, and be thankful for when speaking on their growing pains.
“I want you to know, Will Smith let me have it!” Jada replied. “His take was, that is Trey’s mother and that’s just not your place.”
“The next time I saw you was in the foyer of my house. You took the initiative to make things right,” Sheree responded. “And the one thing I will say about you, you would always say, ‘Ree, I apologize.’ You always owned it. Thank you for that.”
Other gems from the conversation include the importance of showing one another respect, and some of Sheree’s insights on the harder moments of co-parenting. That includes realizing that Trey was building a strong bond with another woman. That, for her, was the hardest thing of all to adjust to.
“The week [Will] told me he was introducing you to Trey,” Sheree said. “And I said, ‘No I don’t think that’s a good idea.’ He said, ‘Well, it’s happening.’ So Trey comes home and I said, ‘How did you like Ms. Jada?’ And he said, ‘I really liked her mommy.'”
“Thank you for loving my baby,” Sheree continued between tears. “So he comes and says, ‘I want to get her a present.’ He wanted to get you a little candle. That was a turning point because I did see your heart with Trey. I did see that you loved this kid. You really did. And I saw a woman who was doing the very best she could.”
“I chose to walk away from the marriage. That’s a choice that I made, and even to this day, thinking that I’d broken up a family,” Sheree added. “I didn’t give Trey what I wanted for him. I didn’t give him what he needed. I didn’t give him what his brother and sister have. That’s hard. But that’s what I have to live with. And that broke me down. It still hurts.”
After the interview, Jada showed her taped conversation with Sheree to Willow and Adrienne as they gathered around the red table. They also got to share some insight into what those early years were like. Because Jada said she never wanted Trey to “feel like he was separate,” for years, they did everything as a full family with Sheree, which impacted everyone.
“I loved going to Sheree’s house,” Willow said. “And I loved cooking with her and sleeping over. I loved hanging out with her. Our relationship was amazing. But I definitely knew there was a dynamic thing.”
It wasn’t the easiest thing to adjust to for Adrienne, though, but she’s grown to see the benefit in such compromises.
“When we first started doing the Christmases together with the entire family, I was like, ‘Really?’ I’m not understanding really why it’s necessary for Sheree and everybody to be here,'” she said. “‘Is that really necessary?’ But that’s some old-school B.S. I love Sheree.”
And we loved the episode. Check out the premiere of Red Table Talk and let us know what you think:
