“I don’t care what you think,” Kody says in a confessional of David Woolley’s advice. “I’m here to apologize and I don’t even want to be reminded of that because it will bring me back to an angry place.”
Kody Brown had an agenda when he went to visit ex Christine Brown on the latest episode of Sister Wives and he was not about to let David Woolley pull him off script — especially if it meant discussing his estranged kids. This isn’t about that, David!
The tense moment came during Sunday’s new episode amid Kody’s apology tour to his ex-wives for the collapse of their polygamist relationships. David was on hand, sitting awkwardly next to his wife as her ex-husband apologized for saying he never loved her and “being the freaking victim, because I wasn’t.”
In a pause, he asked if he could perhaps offer the father of 18 some advice. “Can I give you a little bit of advice? Just a little bit? Start with your kids,” David, who has eight of his own, suggested. “Show that part. Because the women have moved on.”
“Your kids still need to heal and that’s the part that you need [to work on],” David told him, adding that despite “butting heads” with his own kids as part of his own healing journey with them, they went through it and are stronger for it now.
Kody has never been very good at hiding his irritation and he certainly didn’t hold back now, really unloading in a confessional.
“I’ve set a boundary with my kids and I’m setting that boundary with David and Christine,” he explained. “My whole purpose here is to apologize to Christine. Not to David. Not to anybody else.”
The reality star continued, “I don’t care what you think. I’m here to apologize and I don’t even want to be reminded of that because it will bring me back to an angry place.”
He was a bit more gentle in his actual response to David directly, telling him and Christine, “There’s an effort I’m already making and reaching out.”
He explained away from the couple that he took issue with David even weighing on on his estrangement from his children, and has no interest in what he has to say, because the widower is “kind of just on the opposite side of this. He really just doesn’t know what’s going on.”
“He thinks he does,” Kody added. “He thinks he understands polygamy, but he only has a small perspective on it.”
David countered that in his own confessional, noting that he has siblings that lived that lifestyle. “I’ve been around it since basically the day I was born. And so for him to sit there and say I don’t know, he doesn’t know me,” David argued.
Kody was also insistent that the tension with his children isn’t all on him, anyway. “Those deteriorations happened as a party, not as an individual,” he told David. “My bad experience with my children and their pain comes from an experience that we were in together, not that they or I did something wrong and offensive.”
The former family patriarch emphasized that he remains open to reconciliation — or at least communication. “I’m willing to have the conversation. I’m willing to hold space. ‘Dad, you did this, you did this, you did this.’ I’m willing to hold that space,” he said.
And as for David and Christine, they agreed with him that their role in his relationship with their shared kids should be minimal. “You guys can advise my kids to communicate with me,” Kody told them, “but I shouldn’t have you guys involved in my relationship with my children.”
After the tense conversation, David said that he felt good he had spoken up because he actually does see and interact with Kody’s kids on a regular basis — at least the six he shares with Christine.
“When he cut me off on it, I’m like, ‘OK, I had to say what I said just to make sure,'” David said in a confessional. “Because I am around his kids and I do see them hurt and I’m hoping that he’ll reach out to every one of them and it’s not just on his terms. It’s on their terms, too. Trust me, it doesn’t work that way in a relationship with your kids.”
For her part, Christine is hoping to walk out of this time with Kody on a good footing so she can honestly tell her kids that they had a good experience together. “”I want to be able to go home from this and my kids to say, ‘How was it with dad?’ And I’ll go, ‘It was awesome,'” she said.
“They need to know that it’s completely fine to hang out with him,” she explained, hoping to encourage their children to work toward genuine reconciliation and growth in their relationships with their father. “They need to go have fun with their dad and not just sit and have a meal and have a conversation.”
Ultimately, Kody explained that while he’s all in for this apology tour with the ex-wives — Meri is up next — he’s “not interested in being their friends” when all of this is over, and that he’d “never trust them again.” He explained that he’d put trust in each of them already, but “Trust has been murdered. We’re all guilty in that part.”
