Jennie Garth invited her ex-husband Peter Facinelli onto her “I Choose Me” podcast to publicly discuss their coparenting for the first time.
“We haven’t really spoken a lot about life about stuff in years, so I honestly don’t know you … and I don’t think you know me,” Facinelli, 50, said on the Wednesday, June 5, episode of the iHeart radio podcast. “And yet, it’s like when you go home and you’re with your mom or your dad or, you know, your sisters and they just treat you like you’re 16, 17, 18, like, you know the time they saw you last when you were younger, and so there’s this feeling of like, ‘Oh, I know her because we were together for so long, but you’ve grown into this mature, wonderful adult woman and I’ve grown.’”
Sharing Custody 50/50
He continued, “When we look at each other, we still look at each other like the 21- [and] 22-year-old version of each other.”
Garth, 52, and Facinelli were married between 2001 and 2012. They share daughters Luca, 26, Lola, 21, and Fiona, 17.
When you break up with someone and then you still have this immense, tremendous responsibility with them,” Facinelli said, specifically referring to their children. “You have to put everything aside to like to work together. And there’s still a lot of pain there in the relationship not working out [and] a lot of feeling like if you failed the kids, or you know, we failed the kids in some way, and a lot of feelings of, like, ‘my way is right, your way is wrong, your way is right.’”
Keep scrolling for the biggest revelations from their “I Choose Me” discussion:
Having Kids Young
I was a baby having a baby,” Facinelli said of being 21 when Garth was pregnant for the first time. “Like, no, how did [I do] that? I pray every day, I’m like, ‘Please, [I hope our daughters] don’t have a baby because you need had a little bit of wisdom and a little bit of knowledge at that age.’”
He continued, “At 21, [Jennie], you were a year older [and] you’ve been working in the business since you were 15. I literally just landed in L.A. … and six months later, I was having a baby. So you know, that wasn’t planned, obviously.”
Reliving Their Breakup
Facinelli continued, “Sometimes we would drive up to your mom’s house, and I was the guy who drove, I planned the vacations, I was the dad. I was the soccer coach and then I go play parts [on acting jobs] and I was this other person playing parts, and so I was just like, ‘Well, I never got [to] fully develop me.’ I didn’t know who I was, and so I needed to figure that out. I didn’t feel like I had the space to do that within the marriage.”
The Twilight actor was in a place where he was “just starting” his career while Garth was “almost [ready] to retire.” Facinelli ultimately stayed in the marriage longer because of their kids.
How Peter Navigated Parenting and Divorce Simultaneously
Facinelli noted that the girls could often tell when he and Garth had tension, so they tried to put any personal issues on the back burner. “I feel like they needed both of us. You know, they really did benefit from having both of us,” he said. “And I always felt that if the parents are OK, then the kids will be OK.”