Trisha Yearwood adores her newest title: “bonus mom.”
Yearwood, 56, recalled how when she married husband Garth Brooks back in 2005 — she had to navigate how to be apart of his three daughter’s lives, whom Brooks shares with ex-wife, Sandy Mahl.
“I had a dog before I married Garth but no children of my own. I never even really babysat!” Yearwood admits.
“So I didn’t know what to do with three young girls. Garth was such a wonderful mentor to me as to how to be a parent, and he told me, ‘You’ll find your way with each of them. Don’t try to be their best friend, and don’t try to be their mom.'”
And now, 15 years later, Yearwood says Taylor, August and Allie (who are now 28, 27 and 24, respectively) have given her “a lot of grace” as a parent.
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“They let me learn my way and allowed me to be that third parent in their lives,” she says. “They were a gift that I didn’t know I needed. I didn’t know how much children brought into your life until I got a chance to be a part of their lives.”
And once the girls were teens, Yearwood says one of the ways she bonded with them was through dinner.
“We realized it was important [to have meals together] back when the girls were starting to drive,” she says.
“Getting three teenagers together at once is almost impossible, so we started having ‘veggie night’ to try to get more vegetables in their diet. They loved it, and some of the best conversations happened around that table.”
And during this past year, Yearwood says both she and Brooks, 59, have gotten back to eating “all” of their meals together.
“We’ve been together basically 24/7,” she says. “We kind of lost that as we got busier in our lives, and I think that getting that time back was really valuable for us as a family, especially for me being a bonus mom.”