Jay-Z worried he wouldn’t be a good father.
The 48-year-old rapper – who has six-year-old daughter Blue Ivy and nine-month-old twins Rumi and Sir with wife Beyonce – grew up without his own dad in his life, so felt underprepared for parenthood because he didn’t have a role model to look up to.
Explaining how he felt underprepared, he said: “[There were not] very many examples for us growing up of that.”
But everything just clicked into place for him when his first child was born. He mused: “It’s strange that way.” The ‘Empire State of Mind’ hitmaker admitted he felt “a bunch of anger” towards his father when he was growing up, but his stance softened as he got older.
Speaking on ‘My Next Guest Needs No Introduction With David Letterman’, he said: “As a kid, I had a bunch of anger towards him, but as I grew up I realized that the things he went through in life were very difficult.”I’m not heartbroken at this point in my life. I wake up, I look around, I look at my kids, they’re healthy… I feel grateful every day.”
READ:Jay-Z narrates how daughter Blue Ivy told him off
Jay admitted he and his wife have done a lot of “hard work” in therapy to keep their marriage together, and he has strived to find the “emotional tools” he needs to do that after growing up in an environment where he was told to “be a man, stand up, don’t cry”.
He said: “I want to have the emotional tools that it keeps to keep my family together. We did the hard work of going to therapy, we love each other.”
Meanwhile, the ’99 Problems’ hitmaker claimed Donald Trump’s presidency is a “great thing” for America because it has forced people to “work together” and address the “ugly side” of the country.
He said: “I think it’s actually a great thing. “What he’s forcing people to do is have a conversation and band together and work together. You can’t really address something that’s not revealed. He’s bringing out an ugly side of America that we wanted to believe was gone, but it’s still here and we still gotta deal with it. We have to have the tough conversations; we have to talk about the N-word, we have to talk about why white men are so privileged in this country.”
