Real Housewives of Salt Lake City star Heather Gay and her ex-husband Billy divorced over a decade ago. She rarely speaks about him or any custody agreement they might have had.
But in a sneak peek of Season 6, Episode 2, all of that changes, as Heather anticipates her youngest daughter leaving for college.
Heather Gay says her ex-husband “never had custody of the children”
“My husband never had custody of the children,” Heather admits while sitting by the campfire in Provo Canyon. “He never had them overnight. I had them 100 percent of the time. And his involvement was, you know, fun dad visits once a week.”
Heather and Billy share three daughters: Georgia, Ashly and Annabelle. For the first time, she gets really honest about how difficult it was raising three children, basically on her own.
“I look at that era,” she says during the RV campout. “It was really, really, really hard … I couldn’t show them it was hard. I acted like it was perfect and normal … and I loved everything I was doing. But I was gritting my teeth the whole time. I’m exhausted, honestly.”
Though she loves her girls, she’s “looking forward to a new chapter,” as Annabelle gets ready to head off to college in a few months.
“I can’t wait for it to happen,” Heather confesses. “Like it couldn’t happen soon enough for me. And I feel guilty. I just feel like she’s the last part of that era of my life, and I want it to be over with. Like, not my relationship with her, but just trying to be a family. You know? Trying to be [both] the mom and the dad.”
The Beauty Lab founder feels her Mormon upbringing put more pressure on her to raise “perfect” children. “It’s just like, ‘The kids can’t get screwed up,’” she confesses. “That would be my fault. Because we were raised that way.”
“Like, I was born to be a wife and mother,” she adds. “Any desire to be anything outside of that was basically a sin. I was in charge of raising the kids, and he was in charge of providing.”
Even before they split, Heather says she was “100 percent in charge of raising the kids, and I’ve never had a night off.”
Meanwhile, the added guilt of her divorce only made her feel like more of a failure. “It’s like a giant scarlet letter,” she told Bravo’s Daily Dish in RHOSLC Season 1. “I’ve never been able to really break away from it.”
Until she became a Housewife, that is. “Throughout filming, I was able to see myself as independent and as an individual,” Heather said. “It’s been healing to kind of come into my own a little bit. Now I can say … I’m divorced without … trembling and crying.”
The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City airs Wednesdays at 8/7c on Bravo. It streams on Hayu in the UK and Ireland.
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