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Bethenny Frankel spoke of her late mother, Bernadette Birk, leaving everything to her 15-year-old daughter, Bryn Hoppy, during an interview earlier this month.
Nearly two years after the 55-year-old Real Housewives of New York City alum confirmed that her mother had died after a battle with lung cancer, Bethenny recalled caring for her in her final moments, shared her thoughts on Bernadette leaving what she had to Bryn, and explained how her troubled childhood has led to the issues she’s faced when dating.
“I thought I was doing these things for my mother, just because I didn’t want her to feel lonely at the end. I had compassion, and so I was taking care of her and doing things, but like, I didn’t really want to be doing them,” she admitted on the January 7 episode of In Depth With Graham Bensinger. “It just felt so not authentic because you can’t just like, you can’t not speak to someone for decades and then stitch it all together. It’s just not the way it really works.”
While Bethenny never had a healthy relationship with her mother, she chose to reconcile with her at Bryn’s prompting.
“I gave her the gift of my daughter. And I gave my daughter that gift. My daughter’s the reason why we ended up speaking because my daughter really was like, ‘I wanna meet your mama. I wanna meet your mama.’ She was extremely persistent for years, and the minute she said it out loud, I realized I couldn’t not do that for her,” she explained.
Bethenny added, “I didn’t want her to fantasize about what my mother was like if my mother passed away and she never got to meet her, even the curiosity, even the bad. She saw the bad, but she got to meet her and get that closure in her life.”
As for Bernadette’s decision to leave everything to Bryn when she died, Bethenny said it was about the “meaning,” not the stuff.
“It meant a lot for me to say it to my daughter. I don’t know what it meant to me. I really don’t know what it meant to me. She was so far gone for so many years and such a problematic person,” she recalled. “There were just so many issues, so many medical issues, so many mental health issues, eating disorder, alcoholism.”
Looking back on her childhood, Bethenny suspected that she was “painfully honest because [her mother] was so painfully dishonest.”
“I lived in a house of liars. Everyone was a liar in my house,” she revealed.
At another point in the show, Bethenny explained how things said to her as a child affected her as an adult.
“Intellectually, I think it’s being told ‘I gave up my life for you,’ my stepfather saying, ‘your mother never wanted to have you,’ just things like that that I would never say to my kid … [My mom] was like, ‘I gave up my entire life for you. I married all these men for you, to be able to support you.’ It was always on my head about it,” she shared.
Bethenny continued, “She had tremendous money noise, and it’s affected [me] because I want to be dependent upon a man. I don’t want to be a man … so I want to be taken care of by a man, but I don’t need to be taken care of financially by a man, but I want to be because I don’t want to feel like I’m the man.”
According to Bethenny, that’s why she has a “money issue” when dating.
“It’s not an easy thing to navigate. But more importantly than the money, my success is not an easy thing to navigate,” she noted. “The thing that I’m running into more as it pertains to relationships is that pendulum swinging so far from my mother’s experience being that, I thought, if I’m with someone who is as financially secure as I am, that that’s fine, from that aspect, the problem now that’s happening is that it’s really not about money.”
She continued, “As it pertains to men, I’ve run into this a lot where men are seeing sort of the power that I wield, the things that I can get done every day, the people that I know, the access that I have, just the ability to say, ‘I’m doing that. Let’s go. I’m doing this,’ or what comes to me all the time, business opportunities, it makes them examine themselves … ‘What have I done with my life? Am I successful?’ Even if they made money, ‘What’s my purpose now?’”
As she dates, Bethenny has found herself running into men who are insecure about her success.
“They’re not with a younger girl that just thinks that it’s so amazing that they have money and can pay for things and run the program, that I have my own program, I have my own homes, and my own success, that now these men are all like, it brings them inside to look at themselves and it make them feel insecure,” she revealed. “They’re thinking of everything that they’re not doing because of everything I am doing.”