It isn’t an easy road to reconciliation for parents and children who haven’t seen each other in decades. The world knows Kelly Rowland as a hitmaking member of Destiny’s Child, and while the Knowles family has adopted her into the fold as a sister and daughter, Rowland has had unresolved issues with her father, Christopher Lovett.
The pair met face-to-face for the first time back in 2018 after 30 years without being in each other’s lives, and for the first time, they sat down for an interview where they both spoke candidly about their reunion.
“I was angry at him, I was disappointed in him, I had all those feelings of abandonment,” said the singer. “I didn’t know why he wasn’t there… I think as a kid you just feel like if they’re not there, they don’t want to be. So that’s what I felt, and that feeling sucked.” Lovett revealed that he would randomly show up at Rowland’s concerts trying to see her, but she would turn him away because she “didn’t want to deal with that at the time.”
However, it would take a bit of advice from Jay-Z to help steer her in the direction of meeting her father. Becoming a mother and wife also contributed greatly to the decision.
“He said, ‘Love is all about risk. You gotta decide if you’re gonna jump,’” she recalled Hov telling her. “‘You gonna jump?’ That’s what he asked me. ‘Are you gonna jump?’” The father-daughter duo would meet at a hotel in Atlanta.
“Before I walked in, I had all these thoughts of what I was gonna say. ‘Cause, you know, it was hurt in there, it was disappointment in there, it was curiosity in there. There were so many questions,” she said, adding that they spoke for two hours during their initial meeting. “He’s telling me about his dynamic with his father, and his father’s father, and it’s non-existent, too. So how can one learn how to be something when they weren’t taught?”
“He was doing the best he could with what he had,” she added. Lovett said, “I wanted her to hear the other side of the story. Some of the things that other people said (about me) weren’t true. And I couldn’t get a chance to see her… and tell her that I love her.” Watch a clip of the conversation below.