As a child of teenage parents, Bobby Bones was unsure what his own future family would look like — especially when it came to the possibility of becoming a parent.
“Oh, yeah I didn’t know if I would ever become a dad. I didn’t know if I would ever get married,” the two-time New York Times bestselling author, 46, exclusively told Us Weekly on Tuesday, May 26, revealing that becoming a father has brought up “raw emotions” from his own upbringing.
“I didn’t meet my wife until I was almost 40, so I thought it would be nice to have a kid someday, but there was a point where I thought I’m not going to get married, not going to have a kid, and that’s OK,” Bones told Us while discussing his podcast, Bobby Bones Presents: The BOBBYCAST, now airing on Netflix.
Bobby and his wife, Caitlin, welcomed their first child, daughter Billie Celine Estell, on March 20. The couple tied the knot in July 2021 during a romantic ceremony held in the backyard of their Nashville, Tennessee, home. They got engaged in October 2020 after first meeting on the Dancing with the Stars set in 2019. (Bobby won the season 27 Mirrorball Trophy in 2018.)
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“I definitely didn’t want to have a kid and not be able to afford a kid, because that was a lot of what had happened with me as a kid,” he explained. ”We didn’t have a lot, so we got a little older, had a little more success, found the right person, and now it’s just I start to think, like, man, ‘How can you leave a kid?’”
Bobby’s parents split when he was around 5 years old and his biological father, who was 17 when Bobby was born, remained out of the picture. He was cared for primarily by his mother before his grandmother later adopted and raised him, although he did write about briefly reuniting with his dad in his 2018 book, Fail Until You Don’t: Fight. Grind. Repeat.
The NFL Network “Lots to Say” podcast host said that his journey to fatherhood has brought back some memories from his own past, noting it “brings up a lot of like weird newly raw emotions that I didn’t expect to have, but I’m glad I have them, because again, it means I’m thinking about it, I care, I’m being proactive.”
“The baby has introduced a lot of new feelings into the world of where it was just so constant, I didn’t have a lot of feelings, except for my wife,” he told Us. “Now, I got a wife and a baby.”
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As for how he is adjusting to his new normal, “Right now, the tradition is waking up,” he said.
“I already wake up very, very early, waking up even earlier, and bath time,” he continued. “Those are the two traditions right now: waking up extremely early, and then bath time before the baby goes to bed, and then everything in the middle is still kind of like, oh my god, what are we doing?”
