Ina Garten’s mom didn’t hold back from sharing her scathing opinion.
The Barefoot Contessa star, 76, got candid on how her mother, Florence, thought marrying her now-husband of 56 years, Jeffrey, was a huge mistake — years before the couple briefly separated.
“My mother walked into the room and said, ‘I think this is a terrible idea,’” Garten recalled while on “Today” Tuesday.
The chef’s parents drove to Syracuse University to see her after assuming Jeffrey’s phone call to them preceded a marriage proposal.
“I just pulled myself together,” Garten said to Hoda Kotb. She then told her mom for the first time in her life, “I don’t care what you think.”
But her dad, Charles, had a different view of the couple’s union. As Garten put it, her father called marrying Jeffrey, 77, “the smartest thing you’ve ever done.”
The couple wed before she graduated from college as Jeffrey was entering the army.
“He just took total delight in me,” the cookbook author gushed to Kotb. “He made me feel so smart and funny and thoughtful and wonderful, and he was too.”
Garten called younger Jeffrey “somewhat forward-thinking” as he “always encouraged me to have my own life,” telling her early on in their relationship that she should find her own passions in life.
“If you don’t, you won’t be happy,” she remembered him telling her. “I was just stunned because it never occurred to me that I would do anything.”
Once the duo tied the knot in 1968, Garten resisted the idea of having kids.
She pondered, “I was like, ‘Why would I want to re-create that nightmare that I just came from?’”
“I can’t even imagine,” she shared of bringing kids into the world. “I just don’t know if I would have been a good parent,and I love my life the way it is now, and I couldn’t possibly have had it if I had children.”
Garten mused that she and Jeffrey had a traditional marriage at the start.
“He was always the husband,” the Food Network star explained, “and I was always the wife.”
Over time, though, Garten realized she needed an equal partnership.
The two separated briefly, with Garten telling People last month before the release of her memoir “Be Ready When the Luck Happens,” “there were certain roles that we played, and I found them really annoying. I felt that if I just hit the pause button, I would get his attention.”
She noted that Jeffrey “expected a wife that would make dinner.”
“Turns out, I love making dinner!” she teased to Kotb. “I just didn’t want somebody to expect me to make dinner.”
The two eventually worked it out through therapy and conversations about their future.
“We reintroduced ourselves on a different basis,” acknowledged Garten. “And I remember thinking to myself, ‘Oh my God, I’m falling in love with somebody who happens to be my husband.’ It was an incredible experience.”
