Bruce Willis Vows: ‘The Kids Come First’
 Vince Flores/Celebrity Photo |
Everything Bruce Willis needed to know about love, he learned from daughters Rumer, 21, Scout, 18, and Tallulah, 16.
“I would step in front of a car for them,” the actor tells Men’s Journal.
“I’ve peeled every layer off and come to the bright core: it’s just a light … it’s when you can put someone else’s welfare ahead of yours. I can look at how I interact with my kids and say, ‘This is love. I know what it is. I got it.’”
When his marriage to the girls’ mom, actress Demi Moore, collapsed in 2000, Willis — pictured here with new wife Emma Heming — says that they made a conscious choice to stay friends for the sake of their daughters.
Noting that “you can’t spend a decade with someone and raise kids with her and come away unfeeling,” he recalls,
“I just put my head down and said, ‘The kids come first. And we’ll do whatever it takes and maybe even laugh about it’ … Once you start putting the kids first, it isn’t uncomfortable. Bravery is stupid a lot of times, but there’s nothing stupid about this particular subject.”
Click below to read about Moore’s unmedicated births.
His confidence as a dad wasn’t always brimming, however, and fatherhood is something Willis, 54, admits he at one time feared.
“I don’t think I would have had a clue about what to do with kids in my 20s,” he explains. “Back then, I didn’t want to be around kids or anyone else’s kids.”
For women, he later opines, there is “a whole different psychology attached” to parenthood. “They start glowing immediately,” he points out.
Fortunately, Rumer — a surprise baby — arrived when Willis was 33, and up for the challenge. He adds, “By that age I was really into it, like: ‘Let’s go! This is great!’”
Revealing that he was present for the birth of all three of his daughters as well as the births of four other babies, Willis says he is hands-on in the delivery room, too!
“I was right in there — delivering them, pulling the babies out, laughing, crying,” he recalls. “Twenty-five people were in the room — sanitary hospital conditions set aside for the fact that we wanted to share this with all our friends.”
Moore wanted “no drugs,” Willis says, and had “the power of 10 men.”
“[She] almost snapped off two of my fingers squeezing them so hard. I went, ‘Go ahead, break them off. It doesn’t matter.’”
As the girls have grown into young women, Willis says the biggest lesson he has managed to impart is how to stand on their own.
“You’ve got to hope that you’ve sent them into the world with enough information and ammunition to be able to fight for themselves,” he says. “You don’t want your daddy fighting your battles.”
Case in point? When Rumer decided that she wanted to pursue a career in acting, Willis says she approached her parents — and asked them not to help.
“She came back to us and said, ‘I … want to either fail or make it on my own without ever thinking that you did something for me.’ I said, ‘All right, God bless you, that’s great.’ She abandoned the lifeline. She did the hard thing first — which has always been a sign of character in my book.”
