Singer Kelly Rowland lost her mother, Doris Rowland Garrison, in 2014. In an interview with the High Low with EmRata podcast, Rowland talked about wishing she did things differently in regard to her relationship with her mom before she passed.
“The last embrace I had with my mother was a really tough one. It was a lot of, like, tension there,” she told podcast host Emily Ratajkowski. “It was time for her plane ride and we had this really bad argument right before and before she left, ’cause her car was downstairs. I remember my husband saying, ‘Give your mom a hug, babe.’ And I was like, ‘I’m not giving her,’ I was so mad.”
“And next thing I knew, I gave her this wack a– hug and the next call I got was two weeks later that she was gonna pass in like hours.”
Rowland’s mom died from a heart attack at the age of 66. Her untimely death happened shortly after the Grammy award-winning singer gave birth to her first son Titan.
Rowland, 42, says she uses her mother’s passing as an opportunity to do better by people, and in addition, it’s also made her a better parent.
“It made me more present, it made me not want to hold anger or harbor anger towards anybody ’cause life is too short,” she said. “It made me want to be honest with somebody and tell them how I felt in the moment, even if I’m mad.”
In the wake of her mother’s passing, she would go on to repair her relationship with her dad, Christopher Lovett, in 2018. She reconciled with him after over 30 years of estrangement. The “Like This” singer said grieving her mom pushed her to rekindle that relationship.
“I think I … had these feelings of like, ‘Oh my God, I have no parents.’ And it was like, no, you do, you have one left,” she said during an appearance on Today With Hoda And Jenna in 2022.
Although Lovett had made attempts to reach out to his daughter, especially when Destiny’s Child blew up, Rowland wasn’t open to it at the time as she still struggled with feelings of anger and resentment.
“My understanding of where my dad was as a kid was that he was not really ready as a father,” she shared in a pre-recorded interview. “I was angry at him. I was disappointed in him. I had all of those feelings of abandonment.”
The father and daughter have been able to move past that and are now enjoying their relationship and catching up on lost time.
“As parents, we have to give our parents grace,” Rowland said to the Today hosts. “It’s never too late. Forgiveness is always right there.”