Kate Ferdinand broke down in tears and sobbed in secret after Rio’s Mother’s Day snub
KATE Ferdinand has revealed she sobbed her heart out after not getting a card on her first Mother’s Day living with Rio and her three step-children.
Rio had his first three children, Lorenz, 16, Tate, 14, and Tia, 11, with his wife Rebecca Ellison who died of breast cancer in 2015, aged 34, before he started dating Kate in 2017.
Rio and Kate‘s relationship soon became serious and she moved into the family home and treated the children like her own – so she was devastated to be forgotten for a Mother’s Day card.
The former Towie star, 31, who now shares a son Cree two with Rio, and is pregnant with their second child, said: “I wasn’t a biological mum.
“I think it was our first Mother’s Day – maybe I’d been living here about six months, something like that.
“And although I wasn’t a biological mum I kind of felt like I’d taken on the mum role.
“For me, going from living at home on my own to taking the kids to school, cooking them dinner, I felt like a mum.”
Speaking to Rio – who also lost his own mother Janice in 2017 – on her Blended podcast, she continued: “I really thought I might get a card from you, and I didn’t get a card from you.
“I felt bad to express that in front of you because you guys had lost your mum, and the kids have lost their mum.
“So I just went in my room and I just sobbed my heart out – seriously.
“And then I felt selfish for wanting a card – ‘how dare I want a card?’
“So anyone that’s kind of new in this situation might feel like that because it’s a weird one – ‘I wasn’t a biological parent so how could I expect that?’
“But I felt like a mum.”
Kate also told how for the first few years after Rebecca’s death, the family would go to the cemetery to remember Rebecca on Mother’s Days and other significant anniversaries.
She added: “I think we’ve got to the stage now of Mother’s Day, where it might have been five or six years, that we kind of are a bit more used to doing occasions together. We all know how everyone feels and what to expect from the day.”
But Rio, 44, didn’t even recall Kate not getting a card that first year and admitted he made a mistake when she raised the incident.
He said: “I wasn’t being aware of the role that you’re playing, and how invested you are, to – not to reward you – but to go ‘let’s acknowledge Kate for her part she’s playing in some way, shape or form, whether that’s a card or a cake or whatever it is’.
“I got caught up in thinking about the kids about this terrible day for them – ‘It’s not going to be a good day and how am I going to get through it? I’ve got to go to the cemetery’.
“And then the person who’s there putting in all the graft, who’s helping it all go along as well as it can go, you fail to acknowledge.
And you look at it now and think ‘What the f*** was I thinking?’ Mistakes are made.”
Speaking about the emotions of remembering Rebecca on Mother’s Day, Rio added: “Last year we said to the kids ‘Do you want to go to the cemetery?’ because I don’t think you should really lock things in and go ‘this is what we do every single Mother’s Day’.
“It’s a pressure that the kids and yourself don’t need. The way you want to do things can change.
“We asked the kids this year and it was a mixed bag what we got back. A couple said yes and I think one or two of them said ‘No, it doesn’t really bother me going there on that day, I can go any day, I don’t have to go that day’.”
Kate, who married Rio in 2019, said on significant dates the family now sometimes choose to go the day before, so the anniversary date become less emotion-charged.
She said: “We started a while back going to the cemetery the day before.
“That was another conversation which actually helped everyone on Mother’s Day because we then go to the cemetery and whatever comes from that comes from that, and then the next day doesn’t feel as intense for them or for all of us.”
She said to Rio: “We spoke so much about communication, and it’s so funny, because every time your family hear you saying this they’re like ‘this is a changed man, he never used to communicate’.
“If we just assume ‘right, the kids want to go to the cemetery every single Mother’s Day’ we could be damaging them, because actually they might not want to go one year and that’s fine. We try to explain to them ‘don’t worry what everyone else thinks, you’ve got to do what’s right for you’.
“That’s what I said to you at Christmas – you didn’t really want to go to your mum’s cemetery. You said it was just a bit too emotional – we go normally on Christmas Eve. I just said to you ‘please tell the children’.
“Because if they feel like that, they won’t feel bad, and they’ll then understand how you feel. If they want to go to your mum’s I’ll take them, and if they don’t they don’t.”