On Wayne Brady's new Freeform reality series, Wayne Brady: The Family Remix, he admitted that there are some things you might not know about him. For example, he has a 6-month-old son whom he didn't mention before. In a confessional on the show, he revealed that he shares a son, whose name is Val Henry, with his ex-girlfriend Tina.
"My family is everything to me but there are some things I’ve never told anybody outside of this immediate family," Wayne said. "Like, I happen to have a 6-month-old son that people don’t know about."
He admitted that Tina's pregnancy took him by surprise. He and Tina dated "on and off" then broke up, which made the news even more surprising to Wayne's family, his ex-wife Mandie Taketa explained.
"Tina and Wayne had been broken up a year," Mandie explained. "Then [his] grandma Val passes away so we go to her funeral in the Virgin Islands then we come back. Something happened — you fill in the blank. Then two weeks later we get a phone call from Tina that she’s pregnant with Wayne’s baby."
In conversation with People, Wayne admitted that it was a bit "silly" for him to be surprised.
"I asked the silly question that I think many men since the beginning of time have asked," he told the outlet. "'How?' You know how! So get past it."
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Still, Wayne didn't imagine being a dad again at the age of 51 (he's now 52). He joked that Tina's pregnancy was admittedly "not on my bingo card" and at first, he was "floored."
"A 51-year-old dad? I didn’t see it coming. So was I happy? No. Because I was in shock," Wayne admitted.
But now that more time has passed, he has realized that he wants his son to feel that he loves him as much as he loves his 21-year-old daughter Maile.
"I never want Val to grow up thinking that he should be ashamed or look back and go, 'Oh, my dad didn't want me,' or he was ashamed of me," Wayne told People. "Because I want him, in his own way, to know that I love him as much as I love Maile, who is of me and that I had a part in creating."
Wayne's family dynamic is already a bit unconventional, and he has experience co-parenting with an ex. But co-parenting with Tina is "uncharted territory" since he's not close with her in the way that he's close with his ex-wife Mandie.
Wayne is so close with Mandie and her new partner, Jason Fordham, that they live within eight minutes of each other and spend time together on a regular basis.
Wayne even co-parents Mandie and Jason's son, Sunny (he's a "duncle" — dad/uncle), per Entertainment Weekly. It might seem unusual to some, but Wayne and Mandie both worked through their issues after their divorce then became best friends and "soulmates," per People.
When speaking to New York Daily News, Wayne said that he has made his blended family work by setting his ego aside and working on his own flaws. "Jason being a good man to my daughter and to my best friend was more important than my ego of, 'Oh, this guy that used to work for you now is dating your ex wife,'" Wayne told the outlet.
When it comes to co-parenting with Tina, he has also had to figure out how to make it work. "I'm in uncharted territory. How do I co-parent with this person that I am not with and make this work?" he said.
Another reason co-parenting with Tina is different is because he was still with Mandie when their daughter Maile was born, he explained to People. He described it as "a completely different form of co-parenting."
