Whatever You Say I Am_ The Life and Times of Eminem - Anthony Bozza [119]
“Divorce is probably the hardest thing that I’ve ever worked through,” Eminem says. “I feel like I’m a better person because I went through it, I feel stronger now, but you know, it was hard at first. I’ve known this chick all my life; she’s the first real true girlfriend that I ever had. I grew up with this person, and then they want to leave you. At first you don’t know what to do. I put the blame on everything. I put the blame on myself, I put the blame on the business, my career. I put the blame on everything except—I don’t know if I should say that—I took a lot of the heat for that. I blame myself for a lot of that shit. But, it’s like, as it progressed and I got through it and everything like that, I step back and I look at the whole picture, I realize that it wasn’t my fault and there’s nothing I coulda did. It was inevitable anyways. Which is cool, because me and Kim, we’re on speaking terms, we can communicate, no hard feelings, fuck it. Didn’t work, you know, after eleven years, it ended up not working.”
This troubled relationship did, however, yield the one constant source of joy in Eminem’s life: his daughter. He will truly do anything for Hailie. All he has achieved is for her, the one person who inspired responsibility in an artist who channels excess. For all the antiauthority, hardcore traits in his art, Eminem’s views on parenting are midlevel conservative. When we first met, Eminem was more worried by the fact Hailie had asked to wear makeup than he was by the pressure of his escalating career. He has said repeatedly that he wouldn’t let his seven-year-old listen to his albums and pointed to the necessity of a parental advisory sticker on his albums.
“People don’t know this about me, but in everyday life, being a father, I limit the swear words,” he says. “I don’t cuss around my daughter. If someone else is around and they say the F-word, she’s heard it before; I don’t say, ‘Hey, watch your mouth around my daughter.’ That would be ridiculous. After all, I’m Eminem, Mr. Potty-Mouth King. To me it’s different when it’s in a song because it’s music and it’s entertainment. Hailie hears it, but you can’t avoid that, it’s just part of life—you’re going to hear swear words and you’re going to hear what they mean; it’s up to you if you want to repeat them or not. I’d rather have her do that than running around beating people up.”
When Eminem isn’t on tour—especially in 2001, when he was in Detroit making The Eminem Show and 8 Mile—he spends as much time as possible with his daughter. “When I’m home, I wake her up in the morning, feed her cereal, watch a little TV, take her to school, pick her up,” he says. “We watch a lot of movies—typical shit.” In the Eminem canon, his daughter is the only woman who receives his undying love, the only one to be the object of his devotion.
Eminem is characteristically clear-eyed about the themes of his songs and how his daughter may feel about it. “When I was six years old, music flew by my head, but I caught it if there was a swear word in it,” he says. “Kids nowadays are a lot smarter than we were growing up, but if there’s a song that I have that has a lot of swear words in a row, I make her clean versions and I play those in the car. At the end of the day, I would give my life for my little girl. If there’s something that I believe in my heart is going to affect her, then I won’t say it, that’s where I draw the line. There’s a couple of things I said on The Eminem Show that I ended up spinning back because I didn’t want her to go to school and have people say, ‘Oh, your mom did this.’”
Eminem knows he will have some explaining to do, as surely as he fears Hailie’s teens will bring out the Slim Shady in him. “I’m sure Hailie is going to come to me and ask me about all of