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Since her days as Freddie on A Different World, Cree Summer has captivated audiences with her free spirit, beauty, and style. Since starring in the beloved sitcom, the actress has been working behind the scenes voicing cartoon characters such as Susie Carmichael on Rugrats and Numbuh Five on Codename: Kids Next Door.
During that time she also released music and became a mother to two daughters Brave and Hero with her now ex-husband Angelo Pullen. In an interview for Style Like U, Cree opened up about navigating motherhood as a single mom. The 52-year-old always knew she wanted to be a mother before she even knew what that meant. “I had turned 40 and then their (her daughters’) father appeared. He literally appeared. He bought the house across the street,” she said. “He moved in here. We had a really nice, almost a decade together, really good. And then when that relationship ended I became a single mother.” She called becoming a single mother the “greatest fear of my life.”
Growing up, Cree had a great relationship with her parents and she was a “daddy’s girl.” So, becoming a single mom was hard for her to deal with. “I just fell apart, in front of my girls too and they got to see me. Because I have to tell you, that destruction was the best destruction of my life in retrospect,” she said. “I am a totally different person after that. Probably a couple of years ago I would have said I was abandoned but now I say I was really liberated. And my daughters got to see me hanging on by a mosquito [inaudible] right? And then they got to just see me soar.”
She added, “And I think now the greatest, biggest job as a mother is to be yourself.”
Another thing she found since she and her daughters’ father split is sisterhood. While she didn’t go into specifics about it, she did gush about having a sisterhood of women to help guide you through the changes.
“I often find when you go through a separation and you’re on your own as a single mother, boy you sure find what sisterhood is about for real, right ‘cause your sisters come in, especially the ones that have been through it already,” she said. “They come in and they tell you that there is another side.”
Cree and her daughters formed a band called Mama and the Savages and the actress shared how much she loves spending time with her girls. “The thing that I feared the most is the thing I love the most. I feared doing it on my own and I love doing it on my own. Who would of known?”
Cree Summer Proves That Freedom Is Not Giving A F*ck What Anyone Else Thinks
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