Angela Simmons got very emotional in a clip from Thursday’s upcoming episode of Growing Up Hip Hop, as she recounts a recent conversation she had with her three-year-old son. Angela shared a sneak peak of the episode on Instagram, in which she discusses the death of her ex-fiancé, Sutton Tennyson, who was the father of her son, Sutton Jr. In the clip, Angela talks to her life coach, Chenoa Maxwell, about having to tell her son that his daddy, whom she was engaged to before they split in 2017, was no longer with them.
“I was with my son, and super emotional right, even to talk about it. He was looking out the window and he’s like, ‘Daddy, white car.’ I question him, ‘Where do you see him?’ or ‘Who is Daddy? What does he look like?’ I’m asking him. I’m like, ‘Do you want to see your dad?’ and he’s like, ‘Yes!’ So he comes over and I start showing him videos and pictures and stuff, and he stopped.” Angela goes on to note how jarring her son’s next words were, and how they made the whole situation that much more difficult for her. “It’s not like he’s full conversational yet, so this is what kind of makes it emotional. He was like, ‘Is he alive?’ But he doesn’t even say the word ‘alive,’ so for him to ask that is like—whoa. Did you really just say, ‘Is he alive?'”
Angela then had to tell her son the devastating truth about his dad. “I was just like, ‘No. He’s not.’ This is the first time I’m having to explain it to him, which is, like, super sad, because he’s three. How do you explain to a 3-year-old that they’re never going to see them again? Other than my own way, which is like, ‘He’s in Heaven, he’s with God,’ all of the great things. Then he kind of laid his head in my chest, and told me he was sad.” Remembering her son’s reaction overwhelms Angela with emotion, as another wave of tears hits her. She went on to note how challenging this exchange with her son was. “He’s a happy kid, and that whole day, he was just kind of, like, mopey and sad. And I told him, ‘I got you. You’re okay. You’re good’…It was super hard to have that conversation with him.” Sutton was tragically shot and killed in November of 2018 in Atlanta.
