What, what have you learned from raising the 24 year old that's made it easy with the 12 year old or harder?

I would say none of them are ever the same.

That's the hardest part.

You would think we have a 24-year-old and we go, oh, we've almost completed one.

But then a whole new personality comes along.

Like my 12-year-old son and my 24-year-old son.

Two different people.

was like, yeah, what's going

Mm

... stuff like that, and there was a long period where we didn't speak.

And I think I just, I d- did a bit of therapy, obviously, after losing my dad, and I just couldn't see a life where I didn't have Esther and I was gonna be happy.

It, there was, there was a point where I was like, "Oh, she's never gonna speak to me again," and I just couldn't handle that a- a- at all.

Whether it was, you know, even if she didn't wanna be, um, romantically with me, I just don't know that I could've seen myself where she wasn't around or Ethan wasn't gonna be around, um, and I didn't wanna ever lose that.

So I was like, "I know-"

Matty, was there any- anyone who gave you a few words of wisdom or who you looked towards?

No one gave me too much.

[laughs]

Like, like who's, who's this guy? What the hell? So that was my main goal at the start was just to, I think, just befriend him and have that kind of relationship.

Obviously, once you've been together a long time you do move into the fathering role a bit more.

So he never really started calling me Dad for quite a few years in- into our relationship.

Oh.

Um, but that was back to Brisbane, which again, was that whole family thing that we could use.

But we kind of explained it to him in that position, we were in a really weird one because we had Xander at the time was two, Esther was pregnant with Eden, and he was about to go into grade 10, and if I signed on in Melbourne again for another two or three years, he would've been 18 when that contract finished.