The ‘Real Housewives of New Jersey’ newcomer tells ET she and her stepkids are working through their issues, which were brought to the forefront on season eight of the Bravo show.
Margaret Josephs’ time on The Real Housewives of New Jersey is helping her to heal her family.
The RHONJ newcomer laid her family issues out on the table during her first season on the show, revealing that her three stepchildren, whom she says she was “extremely close” to, basically cut her off after she divorced their father, Jan Josephs. Margaret and Jan’s marriage ended after Margaret had an affair with her current husband, Joe Benigno.
The family issues come to a head on Wednesday night’s episode, when the self-proclaimed “powerhouse in pigtails” sits down with her ex-husband to ask if his kids will ever speak to her again. ET caught up with Margaret on the phone to discuss the meeting and what’s happened since.
“It’s very emotional,” Margaret tells ET. “I’m 50, I was with my kids since I was 24. You know, my kids are grown adults. So, I think sometimes the viewers don’t realize that when I was speaking about them. So, it’s very hard, ‘cause I raised them from a young age. I was a young girl. It is very, very emotional.”
Margaret admits there has been progress since bringing her problems up on the show, but it’s a slow process. She says her family is no longer “broken,” but still “disconnected.”
“It’s not that we don’t text message, and I check in on them and I also have my [biological] son … who I’m very close with, [and] he’s always with his brothers and sisters,” she shares. “So it’s just, we’re not together at holidays. We’re not together every day. We don’t speak every day. So, we’re disconnected … we’re not totally back together, but we’re working on it.
“I think we are in a slightly better place,” Margaret adds. “We’re working on it, that’s what I like to say. And you can see I’m very close with my ex-husband, my mother’s close with my ex-husband.”
The Macbeth Collection designer has been candid about how she and Jan tried to make it work for the sake of the kids, but it just wasn’t healthy.
“You can have a great family and not a great marriage,” she notes. “I think a lot of families stay together for the kids, but my kids, I just want to say, were grown adults when we got divorced. Like, grown adults, living separately. They were in their 30s, my stepchildren, and I was with them, like I said, from a young girl. And my biological son was 15 when it happened and he’s now 21. So, everybody really was up and out. But it didn’t make a difference how old everybody was, we were all so close and spent so much time together, I think it cut very deeply.”
Tune into The Real Housewives of New Jersey on Wednesdays at 9 p.m. ET on Bravo to see Margaret’s story unfold. For more on the show, check out the links and video below.
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